The latest experimental documentary by Lynne Sachs — her 49th film overall — is entirely organized around a formal conceit that simply doesn’t work. That’s not to say that Every Contact Leaves a Trace is an uninteresting film. Sachs lights upon a number of very compelling topics and ideas. However, because of the meta-structure she has adopted, none of those ideas really gets a fair hearing. It seems like a criticism to say that a film is “all over the place,” and it is true that Sachs’ film is frustrating more often than not, but one can’t be entirely sure whether this frustration may have been the point all along.
The premise is that Sachs is going through several decades’ worth of calling cards she has collected, over 600 in all. We see glimpses of these cards, and they are from fellow filmmakers, festival administrators, haircutters, gardeners, physicians, academics, plumbers, you name it. Sachs takes this opportunity to reflect on a life spent meeting people, some of whom she never encountered again, while others became lifelong friends. She is operating on the assumption that no matter how brief those contacts may have been, they were significant and left some mark on her life, with the collected cards representing that social encounter.
One could easily imagine Sachs using these cards the way a structurally inclined filmmaker, like Hollis Frampton or Peter Greenaway, might use the alphabet or a numerical sequence. All these different cards are identical in size and shape, all are assigned a name, and this could provide an abstract organizational method that could shape the overall inquiry. Instead, we see Sachs at a table sorting and piling the cards, muttering to herself as she tries to remember who all these people were. It’s worth noting that Sachs mismatches the sound and image during these sequences, so her remarks do not match up with the cards we see in her hands.
After introducing her concept, Sachs briefly meets with two forensic scientists who discuss how trace remnants of a person’s DNA remain on virtually everything we touch. They demonstrate how to lift faded fingerprints and microfibers, and so in a very material sense, Sachs has kept some small part of all the people who gave her their business cards. They are literally on there and could possibly be retrieved. But following this introduction, the question of exchanged genetic material is abandoned. This will be the primary pattern of the film going forward.
Sachs speaks to a small number of people whose cards she retained, and while they appear to have been selected at random, it’s possible they were just the people who were willing to talk to Sachs. We meet a fiber artist who was an old student of Sachs’, a woman who was Sachs’ therapist during a challenging time in her life, a film festival programmer in Germany, and — bonus for those of us involved in experimental cinema — we catch up with the late Lawrence Brose, a major film artist who fell off the radar, for reasons that others may have known but were news to this writer. There is no connection between these people other than Sachs herself, and so Every Contact leans a bit too heavily on her own memories and impressions. This means that the filmmaker places herself at the center of stories that aren’t really about her. This is a particular problem in the Brose section, which is particularly thorny and easily could have been a feature documentary in itself.
There is a refrain that occurs several times, involving Sachs talking with her young niece Viva and nephew Felix. They are mostly discussing why their aunt has kept all these things and what she should do with them. But some viewers will immediately recognize Viva and Felix as being the children of filmmaker/cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. This inevitably reminds us of Johnson’s film Cameraperson, which uses clips and outtakes she shot while traveling the world and assembles them into a quasi-biography. Obviously, there is a significant disparity here, since Johnson’s footage is more vibrant than a 2×3 inch piece of card stock, and the camera operator’s particular task means that Johnson is mostly occluding her own presence, so that when we see or hear her, it is a striking breach of professional protocol, one with ethical dimensions Johnson means to examine.
None of this is really present in Every Contact Leaves a Trace. Without a deeper structure, the fragments Sachs offers do not hang together, and don’t tell us very much through their juxtaposition. As it stands, the film feels like a collection of false starts. However, it does suggest that a larger project might productively emerge from this organizational premise. Given how each component implies that there is much more to see and hear, a viewer might have a richer, more variegated experience by being able to move through the material like a hypertext or an online database. After all, the cards are modular in nature, and a much more expansive exploration of these people and places would probably give each individual component an added weight. Every Contact Leaves a Trace feels unfinished, but that provides negative space that could be room for multi-directional movement.
Published as part of Prismatic Ground 2026.
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