“intimacy means that we can be who we are in a relationship, and allow the other person to do the same. ‘Being who we are’ requires that we can talk openly about things that are important to us, that we take a clear position on where we stand on important emotional issues, and that we clarify the limits of what is acceptable and tolerable to us in a relationship. ‘Allowing the other person to do the same’ means that we can stay emotionally connected to that other party who thinks, feels, and believes differently, without needing to change, convince, or fix the other. An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.”
“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like. If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.”
a common theme across all films from lertxundi i’ve seen so far is that they only talk to you through the frames and sounds (sometimes diegetic) and they’re almost always about longing— even when they’re about love (Footnotes to a House of Love). there’s so much longing for something more, in all of her frames, the 15 minute limit which she has never once exceeded seems very short. in probably her best film i’ve seen so far, We Had the Experience but Missed The Meaning, she has changed her style compared to her previous efforts. this time, she comes at you with heavy visual poetry:
film is literally projected onto pages of a book with two characters on different pages, in the last segment of the film.
there is a remarkable control of cinematic language Lertxundi exhibits in each of her films and as her technique amplifies, so does her perfection.
laida continues to do the same thing with Cry When It Happens, her most obtuse film i’ve seen so far. i liked it, i think but i’m not sure because i didn’t understand more of it. haven’t had the time to rewatch it and read up about it. either way, Cry When It Happens seemed to focus a lot on reflections and reflected surfaces. two people longing for each other is still there.
i think this one uses the landscape of LA the most throughout its runtime and even though i haven’t quite figured out the last sequence yet, it looked so captivating and hypnotising.
025 Sunset Red
my sixth (?) Laida film is probably the most dense film from her i’ve seen so far. so many ideas packed into 13 minutes. and not all of them too far to grasp. 3 minutes in, i realised i had two files of this film and wanted to see what was up with that. turns out one of them was without any audio. so i decided to do a little experimentation of my own and watched the film first without sound then with it. i think i understand Laida’s techniques much better now. sound in her films is almost like the driving force. not that watching this without sound didn’t give me any satisfaction because it did but it was significantly different with no sound. the guitar strumming that starts around 3 minutes in, is an original composition by one of Laida’s friends who made it out of Laida’s EKG at her request. she lays out herself on the physical surface of her film the same way Brakhage affixed moths to his Mothlight film strip. the music goes on for longer than i thought it would and just about takes over the entirety of the film until it stops and gives way to old family photographs. Laida’s parents raised as communists, meeting, spending time together. she’s said how she made 025 Sunset Red because she was tired of everyone saying how her films were praised for being so personal and she had to tell them they weren’t so in protest, she went ahead to make an actual, almost autobiographical piece of cinema. every frame of her work is so confident; she knows what she’s doing and she has complete control over every single microsecond of her films.
utskor: either/or
probably the best entry point into lertxundi’s films. i found this much easier to handle to interpret than anything else she’s done so far. probably because of the simple idea of filming a town and nothing else. lertxundi was commissioned by the norway art commission to make a film about a small town called Utskor and within 8 minutes, laida manages to cover the modern family life, the beautiful landscapes and the violent past of the place.
probably her most restless film yet and for good measure, Utskor: Either/Or positions the calm present on top of the violent past. just like in 025 Sunset Red, Laida again doesn’t let the sound and picture mix, rather lays down the sound on top of the picture to tell two different stories. it’s probably the most efficient way to tell this story within 7 minutes— in a single shot of the water, Laida deftly explores the past and the present of Utskor without uttering a single word. this is also probably the first time i saw so many people in her film? which is a departure from the norm for Lertxundi because most of her work is about hiding the body while this is all about showing as many physical proofs of life in the place she was shooting to give a more real sense of this Norwegian town.
it’s been some time since i’ve managed to come back to this thread and write more about the last 3 Lertxundi films i finally watched. outside of her new Words, Planets, i’ve seen everything and every single one of them has left me very heavy and to my thoughts for a good amount of time. to have that effect on someone in just 15 minutes is not an easy feat.
i’ll probably write an extensive essay about Laida in the new year, once i have some time for rewatches but for now, all i have to say is she deserves the world.
countervisuality 