On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court issued Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the ruling that had guaranteed reproductive rights for nearly half a century. One year later, artist and filmmaker Lynne Sachs was in Memphis, shooting Contractions, in which a driver and a gynecologist discuss their experiences of helping women in need get out of Tennessee and into states with legal facilities. “We see opaque pairs of pregnant people and their escorts (all actors) line up and slowly enter the building,” wrote Edward Frumkin in the Brooklyn Rail when Contractions screened at True/False earlier this year. “The cast’s gestures enact trauma, nerves, and capriciousness in doing something once legally acceptable that is now the opposite.”
Contractions, a New York Times Op-Docs release, will soon stream from the NYT site as the second anniversary of Dobbs draws nearer, and it will screen in New York as part of Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In, a retrospective marking forty years since Sachs took her first video classes at the Downtown Community Television Center. The series runs from June 7 through 11 at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, and we’re delighted to premiere the trailer designed by DCTV’s Omar Khan below.
Sachs “has always eluded easy labeling,” wrote Ren Scateni at Hyperallergic a few years ago. “Since her first short films in the late ’80s—the black-and-white character study Still Life With a Woman and Four Objects and the Laura-Mulvey-inspired observation on gendered bodies that is Drawn and Quartered—she’s eschewed traditional film grammar. She’s focused instead on capturing gestures, inches of skin, fragments of conversations, casual moments in time, personal memorabilia, and weaving them into unexpected patterns.”
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