an interview with Lynne sachs and paolo javier.

In may artists and collaborators lynne sachs and paolo javier led a 3 day immersive filmmaking and poerty workshop called still/moving. the participating cohort has remained together through 2020 and produced 2 additional films.

lynne and paolo spoke with cinema programmer annie horner about their processes as artists and the leaders of this unique workshop experience

This interview has been edited for length.

Annie Horner: Can you tell me a little bit about how you were thinking of framing the workshop in the context of the pandemic, but also the workshop focusing on the interaction of word and film.

Paolo Javier: Well, framing is right. That’s a film reference right there. And really, I thought that I could not contribute to our workshop using terms of cinematic practice, although I do own a Super 8 camera, and I've made short films.  I just didn't think that I could bring anything meaningful teaching-wise about film that Lynne Sachs couldn't do in her sleep!

Lynne Sachs: Interjection-- Wrong!

PJ:  So I approached the workshop with a perspective that I would bring the poetry exclusively,  while keeping in mind my language art’s ties to cinema. This would include sharing my own practice as a poet, and offer specific examples of how my work has engaged with film, especially the history of film narration practices in Southeast Asia: benshi and pyonsa in Japan and Korea, respectively, two live film narration practices that would go on to inform movietelling, a detournement of the practice developed and introduced to West Coast poets in L.A. and the Bay Area by poet/scholar Walter K. Lew in the late 80s. For me, movietelling resonated not only because of its Asian origins, but as a meaningful technique for a poet to engage cinema in the creation of new texts. For our Maysles workshop, I thought it best to introduce how this practice courses through mine and other contemporary poets’ work. Especially because cinema is super accessible to folx, and poetry almost its polar opposite, I felt that I had to really hew to the language of cinema to give myself a shot  with participants who might otherwise be wary about engaging with poetry and more interested in film.

LS: When people come to art making -- whether it’s a short film, a feature, or a poem, they often start with meaning, that is to say, with a kind of responsibility to the world. If this is worth making, then this is worth investing with a kind of ethic or insight. That can be a very large burden. You can give in to some of the processes that Paolo offered all of us, and let some other side of you speak, whether it’s aesthetic, or even physical, and meaning will ultimately come through. So in the reverse order, things start to be much more complex and surprising. I think surprising is really key. I saw this  continue later on after our initial workshop, when people were giving themselves permission to follow an approach that might be awkward, and that awkwardness led to all these fantastic, unexpected results.

Oh, and I wanted to say something about the idea of a workshop versus a class. Neither of us ever called the people in the workshop our students, we called them participants. I think once we recognized that, then it gave us a chance to look at the time we spent together, as very special and distinct from other time. Because people said, Okay, this isn't necessarily my productive time, this is my engagement time. We were asking them to take a language of cinema, in this case hopefully an experimental one, and to apply it to their cell phones.  Also, we really wanted them  to work in this collaborative way where they wrote something and then somebody else responded to it with an image, or they made an image, and then another person responded to it with writing. You were actually limited in what you could do, you were less responsible, which made it more freeing.

PJ: In the workshop, I would encourage participants to consider film as a field from/with which language artmaking is not just possible, but palpable. I would do this by recommending  various approaches to generating texts: automatist prompts; descriptive writing; film critique; the cine-essay; the fragment; improvisational screenplay; etc. The material experience of experimental poets with language is not that different from experimental filmmakers and their experience with the film strip

AH: When you all are looking back on the work that came out of this workshop, is there anything that somebody who is watching one of these films might see that reflects some of what you've been talking about here?

LS: Well, we did encourage people to think about windows. We must remember that our lives right now, in December of 2020 here in New York City, are more porous than they were in May. In May people were hesitant to take a walk, or go to the grocery store. So the window seemed like a getaway, at least for your eyes. That’s why there are so many images of windows. In the first iteration of Still/Moving which became a kind of peering out, the sky was framed, and everything else was framed. I want to say something else about this group and why I think it actually has continued to work together with such commitment from May all the way through December. I would say that that was the least leader driven, teacher driven, or hierarchical group I've ever encountered. And I think that was one of the reasons why people stuck with it. We all felt a kind of commitment to that collective energy.

AH: Could you talk a little bit more about the way that you saw participants interacting with this material word you’ve mentioned?

PJ: It was inspiring to see new texts being generated individually and in collaboration that were guided by how the words looked  and sounded. As someone who grew up in four different cities, and three different continents, I  shared with the participants the permission that I gave myself ages ago to help free up my process: allow oneself to make work that more truthfully inhabits one’s own linguistic history, and embracing of all the disjunctions and parataxis that comes with growing up and moving through polycultural and multilingual spaces. This is different from a practiced experimentalism, and perhaps resonated for folx in the workshop who not only lived in major cities but were aware of the group zooming in from different boroughs, cities, and countries. I feel like the workshop embodied Gertrude Stein’s urging to “act so there is no use in a center.” And I’ll always be grateful to Maysles for the opportunity to work with Lynne and to be introduced to so many talented cine-poets.