Utskor: Either/Or

“The body, a space of production, creates structures for a film.”—Laida Lertxundi

Laida Lertxundi continues her exploration of the American West with the intimately scaled 025 Sunset Red, which folds in autobiography as she looks back to her parents' radical activism in Spain.

This film applies the six principles for composition delineated in ‘Opinions on Painting by the Monk of the Green Pumpkin’, written by the eighteenth-century Chinese painter Shih-T’ao as referenced in Raúl Ruíz’s essay For a Shamanic Cinema (for example, ‘draw attention to a scene emerging from a static background’ or ‘add scattered dynamism to immobility’). The film is composed of scenes with non-actors, and texts by R.D.Laing and Lucy Lippard. Filmed and recorded in Habana, Cuba; Los Angeles; Devil's Punch Bowl; Ryan Mountain; Jurupa Hills, Pasadena and Idyllwild, California.

A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land's song is played and interrupted as guitar makes sound, two women, a bed an armchair, and the beautiful outside. After Bruce Baillie's All My Life. The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises.

Borrowing its title from a literary genre, the film acknowledges the indeterminacy of both fiction and the self. Noir elements are reduced to deadpan gestures under bright California sunlight. Field recordings made in New Zealand are heard as women speak with each other about motherhood, abortion, breakups and anxiety. A civil rights parade moves slowly down a street. Bodies appear in states of weariness, injured or at rest, while songs by Irma Thomas and Goldberg evoke the passing of time and an uncertain future.

A man, a woman and their young daughter live together in an apartment in the Basque Country. Domestic chores and everyday gestures are superimposed onto lush, green landscapes. The filmmakers and their stand-ins reinterpret fragments of a diary. Music fills the house while children’s drawings come to life. Combining quiet observation and moments of fantasy, In a Nearby Field is a film about support, heredity and the invisible labors which sustain us.

Los Angeles City Hall is reflected onto the window of the Paradise Motel. It serves as an anchor for this traversal through the natural expanse of California. Here, we discover a restrained psychodrama of play, loss, and the transformation of everyday habitats. Music appears across the interiors and exteriors and speaks of limitlessness and longing.

Crossing desert and sea, screen and page, between Los Angeles and San Diego, and a moment in a story by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Six women in Paris traverse the anxiety of the city after dark. A filmmaker struggles to understand the film she is making. A Black single mother refuses the categories imposed on her. A former sex worker reflects on her past. A poet gives up trying for a child. Taking place over a single night, the film intertwines dream, fiction, and reality, liquefying one into the other.

Two friends sketch the horizon somewhere in the Basque country, where the sky meets the mountain and the sea. Later, in a dark room, film reels from a previous project (8 topaketa) are projected onto a body that acts as screen

We live in convulsive, contradictory times that demand of us a new way of being in the world: an ethics of generosity and working together, and recognition of our reciprocal interdependence with all beings, human and non-humans, organic and inorganic, with which we share the planet.

8 TOPAKETA is an ephemeral school and a collaborative 16 mm film project made in the mountains of the Basque Country based on a series of open-ended scores lead by invited artists and carried out in small groups between 2021 and 2022.

American plains and high altitudes assembled in a B-roll structure take us to a place of sounds*. Plans américains show color and temperature shifts while an emotional room tone is sustained for the length of a 400ft camera roll.

2004 Spanish experimental short

The story of a beautiful young Russian violin virtuoso who arrives in New York in nineteen-thirteen and quickly falls in love with a demimondain, who introduces her to the speakeasies, opium dens, and dark places of the City. Rebecca's experiences with opium intertwine with her obsession for the stranger until she cannot separate one passion from the other. This leads her inexorably to a terrible fall from grace and an indeterminate future. [Overview courtesy of IMDB]

Lertxundi’s first film since relocating to Spain from California in 2019 is a triptych composed of three independent and yet interrelated pieces – Teatrillo, Inner Outer Space and Under the Nothing Night. A new setting for the filmmaker but the same sun-drenched blue sky and sea. Like all of Lertxundi’s work, Inner Outer Space is a film about relationships – between characters, between characters and landscape, between image and sound – but also, and ultimately, a deconstruction of the production process that highlights materiality and artifice. Just like the blindfolded woman in the film who attempts to orientate herself in a new geography, Lertxundi is learning – through the making of a film – to reacquaint herself with the landscape of her native Basque Country. The concluding chapter – in which two young women perform a mysterious choreography to the projected images of waves – is an outburst of pure feeling.