Lynne Sachs

Lynne Sachs (born August 10, 1961 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American experimental filmmaker who makes films, videos, installations and web projects exploring the relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. She is known for weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. After graduating from Brown University and majoring in history, she developed an interest in experimental documentary filmmaking while attending the 1985 Robert Flaherty Documentary Film Seminar through a scholarship. There, she was particularly inspired by the works of Bruce Conner, who would later become her mentor, and Maya Deren. That same year, Sachs moved to San Francisco to attend San Francisco State University and later the San Francisco Art Institute. It was during this time that she studied and collaborated with Trinh T. Minh-ha, George Kuchar and Gunvor Nelson.

In 1989, she returned to Memphis, her hometown, to shoot Sermons and Sacred Pictures, her first long format experimental documentary. The film is a portrait of Reverend L. O. Taylor, an African-American minister and filmmaker from the 1930s and 40s. This film screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Margaret Mead Film Festival that year.

Over the last two decades she has worked in sites affected by international war, such as Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany. Her films and web projects expose what she defines as the “limits of a conventional documentary representation of both the past and the present”. It is in this style that she has produced five pieces (Which Way Is East, The House of Drafts, Investigation of a Flame, States of Unbelonging and The Last Happy Day) grouped together as the I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER series.

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