Tip of My Tongue

People celebrate their birthdays in very different ways; poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs marked her 50th not only by writing a poem for every year she had lived, but also by gathering together a small group of similarly-aged fellow New Yorkers—some old friends, others strangers recruited for the project—to spend a weekend together talking about their memories. All hail from various backgrounds—Sachs from Tennessee, some from New York, and others from distant locales, including foreign countries (Australia, Cuba, Iran, the Dominican Republic). Their recollections range from the very personal, centering on families and childhoods, to the historical—the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Anita Hill hearings, school shootings, the Occupy Wall Street movement. The participants are given complete freedom to share their memories however they wish, and their tone not only often verges on the poetic, but many speakers also seem to surprise even themselves with what they say. Along the way, Sachs adds visual flourishes, including clips of archival footage, sepia-colored collages (of pictures, quotations, and snatches of verse), and shots of the sun-drenched horizon as land and water meet. The overall result is less informative than evocative—a blend of recollection and rumination mediated through differing perspectives and presented through Sachs’s distinctive verbal and visual layering of word and image to suggest the complexity of remembered experience. Tip of My Tongue is challenging, but will likely more appeal to those interested in film as an experimental art form. A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)