Girl is Presence

During the 2020 global pandemic, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her daughter Noa collaborated with Anne Lesley Selcer to create Girl is Presence. The work is a form of reading and listening in response to disquieting words from Selcer’s poem “Sun Cycle.” The film’s multitude of disparate objects reflect back a disharmonious and tense list of voiced nouns. The poem’s original tone, contextualized by a book that deals with gender and power, takes on an expanded sense here. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, the ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things. Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems. Her work embraces hybrid forms, combining memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include live performance with moving image. Sachs has made 35 films which have been part of retrospectives at Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and China Women’s Film Festival. Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s Year by Year Poems in 2020. Lynne lives in Brooklyn, New York. Anne Lesley Selcer is a poet in the expanded field. They are the author of Blank Sign Book, a collection of essays on art, and of Sun Cycle, a poetry book about the image, gender and power. Their gallery publications and chapbooks include from a Book of Poems on Beauty, Banlieusard, and Untitled (a treatise on form). Occasionally they create off the page—most recently, the opera-based sound performance The Sadness of the Supermarket: A Lament for Certain Girls, and a collaboration for BAMPFA with performance artist Guta Galli. Noa Street-Sachs (performer) works as an investigator on police misconduct cases at a government agency in New York City. She is also a photographer and a native of Brooklyn.   Rebecca Shapass (editor) is a filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, and community organizer living in New York City. Girl is Presence was commissioned by Small Press Traffic for Bay Area Shorts during the national shelter-in-place order caused by the Corona Virus Pandemic of spring 2020.