Sermons and Sacred Pictures
Lynne Sachs
•
28m
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2004 • 29 minutes
In association with the Center for Southern Folklore, SERMONS AND SACRED PICTURES profiles Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Memphis-based Baptist minister who in the 1930s and 40s built a fiery reputation by lacing his sermons with parables, fables and dramatic visual descriptions.
Taylor was also an inspired photographer and filmmaker with a keen interest in preserving a visual and aural record of the fabric of black American life. He photographed and filmed businesses and schools, the National Baptist Convention, baptisms, funerals, and individuals in the quiet dignity of their everyday lives. Over the years he compiled an extraordinary record of Southern black life before the Civil Rights movement.
This film is an innovative combination of Taylor's films and audio recordings, images of contemporary Memphis, and commentary by his widow and others who knew him, forming an intertwined narrative about the pioneering documentarian and social activist. Taylor emerges as a man of humor, piety and intelligence, vibrantly involved in the community he loved.
Up Next in Lynne Sachs
-
Starfish Aorta Colossus
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2015 • 5 minutes
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys. ...
-
States of Unbelonging
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2015 • 63 minutes
The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle Eas...
-
Tip of My Tongue
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2017 • 83 minutes
To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Te...
