Lynne Sachs seeks a dying form of human interaction in Every Contact Leaves a Trace
EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE (Lynne Sachs, 2025)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Sunday, May 3, $7-$14, 1:30
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.prismaticground.com
“Evidence does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. Am I?” Lynne Sachs asks at the beginning of her latest documentary, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, which is making its New York City premiere at Anthology Film Archives on May 3 as part of the sixth Prismatic Ground festival.
The film has a fascinating premise: Sachs goes through approximately six hundred business cards, or what she calls “memory devices,” she has saved over four decades and decides to reach out to a handful of the people who gave them to her. She calls in forensics experts who confirm that it is still possible to dust the cards for traces of DNA and fingerprints, but Sachs wants to take that to the next level and actually reconnect with seven individuals, remembering how they met in the first place and what they have been doing since.
Among the card givers were professors, filmmakers, doctors, publishers, restaurateurs, contractors, hair salons, a fitness center, a lawyer, museums, her brother Ira Sachs, and even my cinematic mentor, Amos Vogel. She ends up taking a look back with Angela Haardt, a dancer, professor, and filmmaker who cofounded the International Forum of the Film Avant-Garde in Germany; experimental multidisciplinary artist and curator Bradley Eros; textile and mixed media fiber artist Betty Leacraft; educator and former chair of the China Women’s Film Festival Jiang Juan; hair stylist Irina Yekimova; and the late experimental filmmaker and photographer Lawrence Brose, who shares a frightening situation he faced that makes Sachs reconsider whether to keep in the film.
Also participating are Obie winner Rae C. Wright as a therapist, and Sachs’s young twin niece and nephew Felix and Viva Johnson Sachs Torres, who help her pick through the cards and share their thoughts. In addition, Sachs features strikingly poetic visuals in black-and-white and color, card shuffling, geometric drawings, fabulous music by Morton Feldman, a discussion of German writer Heinrich Heine, and the creation of new artworks.
“It’s rare to take note how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking,” Sachs says as she recalls her initial interactions with these people and investigates the trace elements that they left with each other.
It’s the kind of documentary that is its own time capsule; fewer and fewer business cards are traded today, and an increasing number of meetings are being held online instead of in person, except for, of course, something such as getting one’s hair done.
“Even like for a split second they left something of themselves in me,” Sachs posits. The same can be said for Sachs’s film, which will leave something of her in you, as she has done with such previous works as Tip of My Tongue, Film About a Father Who, and Investigation of a Flame.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace is screening on May 3 at 1:30 at Anthology, preceded by sixth annual Ground Glass Award winner Kohei Ando’s three-minute My Friends in My Address Book and followed by a Q&A.