From archival snips of an educational film on the weather to cine poems in full blossom, New York film “avant-gardeners” Mark Street and Lynne Sachs create their 3rd XY CHROMOSOME PROJECT. This program of 10 short films on both single and double screen gleans audio-visual crops from the dust of the filmmakers’ fertile and fallow imaginations. In this avalanche of visual ruminations on nature’s topsy-turvy shakeup of our lives, Street and Sachs ponder a city child’s tentative excavation of the urban forest, winter wheat, and the great American deluge of the 21st Century (so far).
(72 minutes total)
XY CHROMOSOME PROJECT III will be screened at 7pm on Saturday, September 27 at 322 Union Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This screening is the first of two screenings with Mark Street. The following night, Sunday, September 28, Mark’s most recent film, Hidden in Plain Sight, will screen at 7pm. There is a suggested donation of $8 for each screening.
List of Films:
“Weather Mix/Collision of Parts” (12 min) M. Street, 2008
An overture: Weather Mix considers nature’s uneven keel while Collision of Parts takes us on a twisted roller coaster ride through small forgotten moments in New York City.
DOUBLE SCREEN
“Buffalo Disaster Relief” (9 min) M. Street and others, 1972
Archival footage filmed by the US National Guard of Buffalo, New York’s worst snowstorm on record. People attempt to reclaim their daily vignettes in the course of a larger narrative.
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“Window Work” (9 min, sound) L. Sachs, 2001
A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper — simple tasks that suggest a kind of quiet mystery. Small home-movie “boxes” within the larger screen become clues to the woman’s childhood, mnemonic devices that expand the sense of immediacy in her “drama.”
“Winter Wheat” (8 min, sound) M. Street, 1989
Made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. The manipulations of the film create hypnotic visuals while suggesting an apocalyptic narrative.
“Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” (14 min, sound) L. Sachs, 2008
A visual equivalent to Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem. An homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the Big Apple.
DOUBLE SCREEN
“Sliding Off the Edge of the World” (7 min, silent) M. Street, 2001
A stab at depicting daily life near the end of time: fleeting images burst onto the screen only to recede from view just as quickly, suggesting transition and decay. Tendrils of images cluster together and then dissipate. It all seems like it could fall apart so quickly.
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“Noa, Noa” (9 min., sound) L. Sachs, 2006
Over the course of three years, Lynne collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of a Brooklyn park with camera and costumes in hand.
“Behold the Gowanus Canal” (6 min, sound) L. Sachs, 2008
On Earth Day 2008, Lynne, Mark, and their daughters float down the Gowanus Canal with environmental visionary Ludger Balan, head of the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy.
DOUBLE SCREEN
“Infected City” (14 min. sound) M. Street, 2008
A coda: the stars and the city meet for one last dance between the known and sublime.
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“New Orleans, Louisiana” (14 min, silent) L. Sachs and M. Street, 2006
One year after Hurricane Katrina, Mark and Lynne traveled to New Orleans to help raise money for Zeitgeist Theatre Experiments, a struggling microcinema continuing to show alternative films to the passionate but dwindling local community.
