Brooklyn documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs is the recipient of the POV Award at the San Francisco Film Festival on April 29. The festival will be screening her latest film, “Every Contact Leaves a Trace.” Go here for more information. On May 3 the film will also be shown at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives. Go here for more info and tickets.
Sachs has a collection of 600 business cards and decides to choose seven of them and attempt to reconnect with the persons who gave them to her. (Her ramblings while searching for candidates–”Oh, she won’t talk to me!”–is one of the most amusing parts of the film.) She says the premise is a foundation of forensic science invented by Edmond Locard, a forensic pioneer: any trace can link a person to a place, another person or an object. She even has a scientist analyze the cards for fingerprints and DNA. (This doesn’t reveal much.)
In her director’s statement, Sachs reports that “Chance meetings become distinct and revealing punctums, each physical interaction an encounter that pricks.” Punctum was a concept Roland Barthes created for his 1980 book on photography “Camera Lucida.” He distinguished between the “studium” of a photo (the obvious symbolic content of the photo) and its “punctum” (something, perhaps incidental, that “pierces” the viewer in a person way). In her usual technique of hybrid filmmaking, she comes up with a different way to model her interactions with the seven contacts.
One of the most unsettling contacts for her is Lawrence Brose, an experimental film artist whose films explored his gay sexuality, especially his feature-length film “De Profundis,” a hand-etched film inspired by Oscar Wilde’s 1887 letter to his lover from prison. Brose reveals to Sachs that he was charged with having child pornography and she wonders if she should cut him from the film only to learn later that he was innocent: a member of his art collective had downloaded the material and yet he was charged and his lawyer advised him to take a plea deal rather than to go to court.
Sachs met two of the contacts via her presence at various international film festivals over the years. Angela Haardt is a German avant-garde film artist who was born in 1940 and recalls her memories of Nazi Germany, including the continued popularity of 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine, whose work was banned by the Nazis. This prompts Lynne, who is Jewish, to think about the genocide in Gaza. Jiang Juan, a champion of films by women in China, lives with the director for awhile; Sachs uses striking split screen footage of her to illustrate her perception of her in the past and the present.
Betty Leacraft is a textile artist who lives in Philadelphia. She gently tutors the filmmaker in needlepoint, demonstrating her own method of tying off thread. Actress Rae C. Wright is employed to play a former therapist of Sachs whose advice surprised her. Lynne interviews her niece and nephew (children of her brother, filmmaker Ira Sachs) about her project. They offer her whimsical takes from a younger generation.
Sachs created a way to diagram her interaction with her contacts with white markings on a black background. (It looks a bit like football play diagrams.) One wonders how the film would differ had she chosen other business cards, which makes “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” what Barthes called a “writerly” text, one that forces the viewer to engage actively with the work. You may even want to go to your own collection of business cards and create your own series of experiments. Featuring a great soundtrack by Stephen Vitiello and lovely animation, Lynne Sachs’ latest film is another wonderful addition to her long body of perceptive, funny and warm feminist-informed explorations of creativity, memory, seriality and politics.
Go here to listen to Adam Schartoff’s interview with Sachs about this film.