Autofiction

Autofiction

2020 · 13 min · ★ 4.5

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.

Directed by Laida Lertxundi

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Live to Live

Live to Live · 2015

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

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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.

Words, Planets

Words, Planets · 2018

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.

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My Tears Are Dry

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.

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

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MovieDramaFantasy

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.

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Affirmation · 2020

MovieDocumentary

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.

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In a Los Angeles interior, moving walls for loss. Practicing a song to a loved one. A film of the feminine structuring body.

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The Four Troublesome Heads

The Four Troublesome Heads · 1898

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MovieComedyFantasy

One of the greatest of black art pictures. The conjurer appears before the audience, with his head in its proper place. He then removes his head, and throwing it in the air, it appears on the table opposite another head, and both detached heads sing in unison. The conjurer then removes it a third time. You then see all three of his heads, which are exact duplicates, upon the table at one time, while the conjurer again stands before the audience with his head perfectly intact, singing in unison with the three heads upon the table. He closes the picture by bowing himself from the stage.

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