http://laidalertxundi.com/home.html
Setting soundtracks to the desert, the sea, and the sky.
Still from The Room Called Heaven, 2012, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
I am interested in her choice of careful frames, her relation to the body and its representation, and how uniquely and interestingly she succeeds in emphasizing the aural environment so that it directly influences and cannot be pulled apart from the image. There is a mysterious quality to her films that is both natural and unpretentious. I watch her films over and over again, the same way I’ve rewound a mix-tape over and over again to a specific track that pulls me out of myself.
Born in Bilbao, Spain, Lertxundi has had solo exhibitions at Alhóndiga Bilbao (2014) and Marta Cervera Gallery in Madrid (2013), and her work has been exhibited at the 2013 LIAF Biennial, 2013 Lyon Biennial and the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Lertxundi is also a film and video programmer in the US and Spain and has published numerous articles on film, most recently in the anthology La Risa Oblicua and in Bostezo magazine. She teaches film at the University of California San Diego and resides in Los Angeles. Her last film, We Had the Experience but Missed the Meaning (2014) had its New York premiere this summer at BAMcinemaFest and has already exhibited internationally.
A few weeks after a preview screening of Utskor: Either/Or (2013), Laida came to meet me in between screenings at Spectacle, a microcinema in Williamsburg. It was December, in the middle of a blizzard, and I remember the snow was twice as deep when we left a couple hours later as it had been when we’d begun. I program films at Spectacle, and Laida and I began our conversation around curation.
Katie Bradshaw I read that you curate film programs at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Are you still programming?
Laida Lertxundi I curated
at CCCB for ten years, and now when I’m asked to show my films, I show
them with other people’s work that I care about. I recently curated a
screening at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. I was at
an artist residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts for a couple
months and Steve Polta from San Francisco Cinematheque asked me to do a
show. I showed The Room Called Heaven with Keep in Touch by Jean Claude Rousseau, Beatrice Gibson’s film Agatha, and a film by Harun Farocki called Ein Bild (An Image), which is about the process of making the cover photograph of Playboy.
KB Why did you want to show these films together?
LL They were works from
different contexts that I threaded together in dialogue with a Giorgio
Agamben essay titled "Notes on Gesture." He talks about gesture as the
essence of cinema, and what makes it a social medium. He writes about
the bourgeoisie losing its composure, and scientific studies that used
film to record uncomposed movements and breakdowns of the body. All the
films had a lot to do with body language and gesture.
KB The phrase “uncomposed movements” reminds me of the way bodies inhabit space in your films. In Footnotes to a House of Love,
for example, were you constructing the environment up from nothing and
then filming what happened? Did you direct particular actions within the
space?
LL I’ll tell people what
to do and what the parameters are within that situation, but not how to
do it. It’s not about choreography, acting, or a way of doing something,
but about what happens once these things are put in place—a way of
being through the work. It’s interesting to look at Footnotes in relationship to Utskor: Either/Or,
because they’re very similar in terms of method. I settle into a place
where I have a lot of time. I either live there for a while or go there
often, and different people come and coinhabit with me. In Footnotes we found this abandoned house in the desert and spent six months going there.
I wanted to enable a space where people were really comfortable
and were able to be intimate, or if they were uncomfortable, be okay
with showing that on camera. It’s a very specific emotional and social
space, and there are a lot of things at play. Part of it is not making
it feel like work, like a crew. I spend a lot of time not filming, but
just looking and listening and being with people in the place.
Still from Utskor: Either/Or, 2013, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
KB Was Utskor a similar situation, did you live there for a time?
LL I was in Norway for
about two and a half months total, which wasn’t very long. I like to
have more time. We couldn’t afford being anywhere in the archipelago of
Lofoten in the Arctic Circle, so we ended up in Utskor, which is a town
way up north in Nordland. There are six houses in the village, and only
one that is inhabited year round. To get one errand done you had to
travel about four hours over bridges and in boats. It was the most
remote place I’d ever been in.
People would visit to be in the film and just stay with us.
Christina C. Nguyen came with me, and then friends from Spain and New
York came. The family I was shooting with was from Norway and Germany.
The house itself had this 1800s look and 1950s decoration. Without
distractions, we were very awake to the feeling of time passing and of
our presence there. Our only neighbors were sheep. Utskor is a character
in the film, this place you could be in love with. That’s why the
Utskor sign keeps coming back.
KB There is a scene where you
layer a shot of the setting sun on the ocean over a recording of 23-F,
the attempted coup d'etat in Madrid in 1981. Can you talk about this
audio and the combination?
LL I used the sound of
the coup d’état against the midnight sun. The midnight sun is a sun that
doesn’t set. It happens that far north, and it is spectacular. The
sound of 23-F marks my whole generation in Spain. My mom was pregnant
with me when it happened, and I was born about two months later, so I
like to imagine I heard it as well. There is a transition of red that
comes just before that shot, the red having to do with that very charged
time of transition from Franco to a democracy in Spain.
Still from Cry When it Happens / Llora Cuando Te Pase, 2010, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
KB The midnight sun as
symbolic in regards to Spanish politics? The sun that hasn’t set and
won’t set, the unrest that isn’t over …
LL Yes, and that day, February 23, 1981, was an either/or
moment. Until midnight of that day people didn’t know what was going to
happen. We could have reverted to a dictatorship. My parents were
packing.
KB Your use of speech and text is different in Utskor than your other films. The scene in which the child is reading Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State stands out especially because it’s so referential. I search for meaning in the inclusion of this text.
LL Are you looking for the message?
KB Well, there’s a text
read about family and we’re thinking about and seeing a family. There’s a
clearer relationship between people. In your other films there seems to
be definitely less of a narrative thread.
LL I agree, the family has a more clear relationship.
KB Yes, but I don’t
really want to say “narrative” or “message,” because I don’t get the
sense that you’re pushing either, but I guess in contrast to your other
films, it feels in Utskor that you were playing with or concerned
with making these references more directly. One could read a meaning in
the child reading Engels.
LL It's satisfying to
work with these texts because I’m so familiar with them and this
political climate. I grew up in a country in constant political unrest.
It’s not just about the surface meaning of the text. The kids reading
Engels is an autobiographical moment. For some people it might feel
narrow, but for me it feels open, like an entry point.
I teach a class where I show Alexander Kluge’s Brutality in Stone,
and we think about representations of suffering. The film makes a
collage of Hitler’s speeches and Nazi architectural plans to illustrate a
certain brutality; it’s brought to the surface, but not explained. I’m
interested in this way of dealing with political matter where meaning
remains latent, and not having to resolve it for an audience.
KB Not trying to represent or explain the feeling and failing.
LL And making something open that makes you want to know more about that event. Reading Engels you can feel
his feminism. I was interested in this young family, what it means to
reproduce, and how they were thinking about doing it on their own terms.
Sarah Schipschack, the woman in the film, and Leif Magne Tangen, her
partner from Vitakuben, were producing the film. Sarah’s presence in the
film is very important, her strength and her ability to nurture. She’s
the mother of the little one. She’s been a friend of mine through my
work.
The film plays with Utskor as a palimpsest, inhabited by another
place and time. The editing is very abrupt, and there’s this feeling of
something about to blow up, a familiar feeling.
Still from Footnotes to a House of Love, 2007, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
KB In this film I feel like
we're experiencing more non-diegetic music. There are fewer tape players
visible than in your earlier work, and there is no one playing an
instrument on-screen. You’re almost creating an environment where the
sounds we're hearing might be played, like the recording from the
coup. There is also the song by the Hucksters played over a shot of the
Utskor sign which is played completely off-screen. Were you
experimenting with different uses of sound in this film?
LL It is all still
diegetic sound. When you see the sign of Utskor and hear that Hucksters
song, it’s playing in a car that is right below the sign. It’s
off-screen sync sound. So the technique is the same, but the use of
overt text is different. I was thinking about language as another sound
material recorded within the same space.
KB I want to watch all of
your films again thinking about where all the sounds are coming from,
knowing that you’re sticking to the rules.
LL Yeah! Like from the
kitchen we see the close-ups of the mountains and the sound cuts to
Bobby Bland. He had just passed away that summer. It seems symbolically
diegetic: “I hear this in this room but I’m looking at that mountain
through the window.”
Still from Cry When it Happens / Llora Cuando Te Pase, 2010, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
KB I was thinking that the
sounds of people speaking and reading were so different than the music
played through the films, but really it’s the same in terms of sound.
LL Yes, and what I liked
about the part where the child is reading, is that she’s Norwegian and
German and she’s reading in English, and her German mom is trying to
help her pronounce the English words. At the same time the baby is
making all these sounds. Language is also sound.
KB And the voice is part
of the body. So starting to think of speech and language as another
sound that derives feeling or atmosphere, as we might experience ambient
sound or song.
LL Right, it’s not just
about this text, it’s about these bodies trying to make this text
legible. The baby’s interrupting and the girl is reading and stumbling
over words like “opposition.”
KB There’s still a
different quality to the reading of the text than the Bobby Bland song,
for example. But one can of course read meaning into the songs, maybe
more so than the speaking parts.
LL In Utskor there are more words than in my previous films. In The Room Called Heaven,
right before a man gets ice water poured on his head, the song says,
“You set my heart on fire.” So right before the ice, there’s fire.
Later the lyrics of a song say, “Images blue, yellow and green,” and you
might remember seeing those colors in the film. The images and the
words are in dialogue. So there’s some language in my other films. In The Room, the person pouring says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and very quietly the other says, “It’s OK, keep pouring.”
Still from The Room Called Heaven, 2012, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
KB You’ve talked about
bringing your soundtracks to the foreground. I think the sounds in your
films take precedence over the images. It’s as though they move the
image and carry the film.
LL Yes, sound is not an
accompaniment. I never disassociate the process of editing sound from
that of images. There is this Michel Chion phrase I love about the
predominance of sound: “a ‘heard space’ in which the ‘seen’ bathes.”
KB Do you ever start making a film with a song in mind? Or do the songs usually come after?
LL The song becomes this
piece that responds in rhythm, emotion, or content to the environment
it’s in, to the landscapes, people, props, and rooms but also to its
location in the film. I try out different versions first.
KB And how do you “cast” your films? Did you know you wanted Josette Chiang to be the woman on the bed in A Lax Riddle Unit?
LL I’m interested in the
comfort and intimacy you can feel with someone, while so much of them is
unknown to you. I asked Josette if she’d be around to help with the Lax shoot and if she’d be in the movie, and she said, “Be in the movie? No way!” That’s the common denominator, if someone doesn’t want to be in the film or has resistance. If they don’t want
to be on camera and if we can make it work, it’s like working through
something and it’s an interesting challenge. If they’re going to act,
you can see it in their face, and that’s going to ruin everything.
KB (laughter) So you’re not looking for people who will take it as an opportunity to act?
LL If they want to act in the film, you can see it in their body. When I was shooting The Room we tried doing a shot of a friend's hand reaching into a fruit bowl. He was acting through his hand! (laughter)
It’s pretty subtle … But I definitely don’t use actors, just a mixture
of people I know and don’t know. I look for that line between people
just being themselves and knowing they’re on camera. I usually work with
people who can be pretty deadpan.
It’s a tricky thing finding a person who can take the gaze of the
camera, and not change for it. That’s something I love in Peggy
Ahwesh’s work, who was my teacher. People in her films seem to be
themselves, while also acknowledging the camera. She gets it from Andy
Warhol’s films, I think. There’s no suspension of disbelief.
Still from The Room Called Heaven, 2012, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
KB Like acknowledging that the camera is almost a person, or some kind of presence. I like that scene in The Room Called Heaven
when the train comes and Christina is standing near the tracks, and she
just looks around and walks off camera. The action feels very
unrehearsed, or sort of accidental, the way she just leaves.
LL Yeah, I told her to
try to be as immobile as possible to enable this contrast with the
motion behind her, and I think she was hypnotized by the loudness of the
sound. She has to wake up and look around before she passes.
I will tell a person to do something but not the amount of time
we are going to shoot for. I always tell people to keep going, if the
camera is running to just keep doing what they’re doing and to not feel
like they’ve made a mistake. Hopefully that is avoided, because there
aren’t rehearsals and there are always a lot of versions of things. It’s
not a very economical way to work! (laughter) But there are so many things that could happen which could be useful.
KB I’ve felt an intimacy in many of your films, a sense of being comfortable and at home. I really like A Lax Riddle Unit for this reason. In Genevieve Yue’s interview with you in Film Quarterly, you said that particular film was you sort of “catching your breath.”
LL Well, the film I had made before, Cry When It Happens,
felt really ambitious for me. It involved more people, more landscapes,
more shoots. I felt a little more like I was putting people to work or
something. The process itself was more mysterious and intense. With
longer films there is sometimes this feeling of things falling apart,
machines breaking down, and with doing films with live sync-sound ... It
can be a mess. This might be a shot, or this might be nothing.
Lax was a return to a shorter piece with fewer settings,
which is centered around a few moments. There were less people involved.
It was mostly shot in my own apartment at the time, so it felt like I
could hold everything together. Cry is composed of static shots
except for two pans that are symmetrical in their places in the film,
one going right and one going left. Lax is all movement. I
thought of opening the aperture as a kind of movement. I had worked with
dollies before and I wanted to build something homemade with wheels
that moved 360 degrees, so when I pushed it down the hallway the
movement recorded feels like walking in space. You move forward but you
look around. If you use a real dolly, you find this perfectly controlled
forward movement. It doesn’t feel like a body. I’m glad you liked that
film.
KB You often do so many
interesting things with landscapes and wide spaces, so it was
interesting to see what you were going to do with the space inside of an
apartment. You do move outside near the end of Lax with shots of
the city, but there’s this different kind of feeling. You tap into the
feeling of being in a space in which you’re comfortable, a place in
which you could stay forever, though it doesn’t feel closed in. It feels
vast.
Still from My Tears Are Dry, 2009, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
LL I like that, the idea that Lax
has more of a feeling of company. I was making the movie with three
people, one of whom is doing sound off camera. The camera and I are
another person in the room. What is that role of the camera? When
Josette looks at the camera, it seems like she’s addressing it, me, us.
That is unusual.
KB Yes, she turns her head to look at the camera. There’s another moment where a woman looks directly at the camera, in Footnotes. These moments stand out. The back of the head is actually featured more often in your films.
LL (laughter) Yes.
KB It could be a number
of people really. Actually, it was a little embarrassing to realize that
it wasn’t the same person appearing over and over, this mysterious
person with long black hair.
Still from Utskor: Either/Or, 2013, Laida Lertxundi.
LL Yes, the back of the head
... You see someone seeing, instead of being afforded the pleasure to
look at them. Some people tell me they see three people in a film, some
people tell me they see fifteen. I am drawn to this space in the films
where certain things become blurred, in gender and relationships, in how
many people there are. There’s something comforting in that.
KB The sky comes back
repeatedly in your films, and it’s full of potential. But it’s this
void, a very breathable void but still overwhelming.
LL In my films there’s a
play between what is really open and large and what is very intimate,
like medium close-ups of objects and parts. Meaning and affect will
carry through those changes, and get projected onto the sky.
KB Your use of superimposition in The Room Called Heaven
is a powerful device, with the doors superimposed over the sky and the
waves. I really like the opening and closing of the doors. Are we pulled
in or pushed out?
LL I like this state in
which you are moved, but you’re also thinking about the process. In the
shots you mention, the hypnotizing effect is made with a wrinkled sheet
which you can see behind the sky. There’s something pretty basic about
it.
KB You use bed sheets frequently: red sheets as a transition point in Utskor, sheets in the sand in Footnotes. The first film of yours I saw was Footnotes, when I was interning for the PDX Fest. I was helping to watch the film submissions.
LL You said you were confused by the film?
KB (laughter) I
remember that I really liked the film, but without sort of more
background about your structures and the rules you were using, I felt
confused. I remember seeing this construction of a kind of dreamscape;
the combination of the desert, these people, the beauty. And the
soundtrack of soul music and girl groups conjured up dreamy, nostalgic
feelings. I think I had a sense of resistance to the way you were
dissecting bodies in your cropped shots. But basically it was
problematic to me that I couldn’t figure out why I liked the film, if
that makes sense.
Footnotes would have been so different if it had been
close-ups of faces, with the setting and the light. Then the film would
feel like it was only about love or beauty, because we create stories
with the face, of course. We would read into the faces to find things we
think we saw. But your emphasis is never on the face or the expression,
and the body’s not really the subject. It’s not given more importance
than anything else, and we’re not even necessarily looking at it.
Still from The Room Called Heaven, 2012, directed by Laida Lertxundi.
LL The face is so
interesting that it can be distracting. We want to read every
expression. It’s also emotional, it has this heightened feeling but we
can’t define what it is. Footnotes was partly inspired by
westerns too. The abandoned house felt like a house out of a John Ford
movie, and the film was playing against narrative. The length of the
shots doesn’t feel coherent.
KB And your framing
doesn’t either, holding this “off center” shot steadily. There’s a shot
of the tape player and two people kissing almost off frame. You can’t
see their faces, you can’t see them kissing, and while our attention is
drawn to them, you’re so purposefully focused on the tape player.
There’s this tension, maybe that’s this feeling of confusion I’m talking about. You really want to see this action happening, but you can’t.
LL It has to do with
displacing where the center of something is. The viewer wants it to be
about people or a character, but it’s about sound, or a space, or a
building. I rearrange and take apart these formal conventions and then
you have to enter a new space, and maybe there’s something freeing in
that. I began playing with form or habit and the way we anticipate
things happening in a film. I think it’s productive, when there’s
something happening in the form that’s uncomfortable.
KB After you made Footnotes, did you think, “OK, I’m going to keep going with that”? I mean experimenting with, as you said, “displacing the center”?
LL I think I am one of
those people who works on the same thing over and over, using the same
tools or ideas in repetition. This might sound boring, but I think if I
can stick to something very closely, I will see it change as well. - http://bombmagazine.org/article/1000289/laida-lertxundi
Dan Fox What’s your relationship to California? Films such as Footnotes to a House of Love (2007), My Tears Are Dry, and A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) depict apartments and domestic spaces, but they also feel like hymns to Los Angeles and the landscape around it.
Laida Lertxundi I treat Los Angeles and its surrounding areas as a subject in my films. To make films here is to enter into dialogue with the misrepresentations of the city that Hollywood creates: we share the same space, history and, to a certain extent, the same resources. My approach is non-spectacular; I want to present Los Angeles as a lived-in place. In a city with little public space, this becomes about the intimacy of interior spaces and the magnitude of open landscapes. I like to define the work as ‘landscape plus’: the natural environments in my films are being altered by people and objects that operate as a kind of demarcation or interference in the land, creating an image of the filmmaker in the landscape.
DF Can you talk about your use of music? Songs by Hoagy Lands, The Shangri-Las, Robert Wyatt and James Carr all appear in your films, cut together in ways that suggest more than ‘mere’ soundtracks.
LL Part of mediating the landscape is making a soundtrack within in it in real time. I insist on using diegetic music, which places its source on or off screen. Even when we can identify the source of music on screen, it has power over our emotional field but it refers to itself as a part of a whole.
I want to expose the process of making a soundtrack, never treating music as a background to images. I treat it as a material, often seen as well as heard. At times, it enters into a conflict with the image or gets desynchronized. The music recordings are made live during shooting and sound is always recorded from another source – for example, a record player, CD or monitor – with the sounds of that particular environment: traffic, street noise, or sounds that occur out in nature such as birds, or the loud hum of an aeroplane. Because there are people in my films, there is often a question of whether I am engaging in narrative or fiction. But there is none. Narrative is replaced by sound and image relationships, compositions that lean more towards music than film narrative.
DF What’s your relationship to analogue technology? Aside from the fact your films are shot on celluloid, they also feature record players, tape recorders, radios and TVs – technology of the late 20th century rather than the digital 21st.
LL There is a precariousness to working on 16mm and I like to refer to this by using analogue sound-making devices within my films. In Footnotes to a House of Love, My Tears Are Dry and particularly in Cry When it Happens / Llora Cuando Te Pase (2010), these are breaking, slowing down – instruments are missing a key or are slightly out of tune. I use all these things as a reflection of 16mm itself – obsolete or breaking down but still going. That said, all my editing and, very importantly, my sound is mixed digitally. There is also a DVD player in Cry When it Happens, so we can’t say that the work is strictly analogue or digital. It is more accurate to say that technologies from different times are made to work together. There is a relationship between these machines breaking and the themes of heartbreak and loss that often appear in the music I use, both drawing a picture of a world that is falling apart. This unsteadiness is also the point where something new can be made.
DF What filmmakers have influenced you? My Tears Are Dry is wonderfully redolent of another Californian filmmaker, Bruce Baillie, whose films such as All My Life and Castro Street (both 1966) are portraits of places and moods.
LL I’m glad you draw a connection to Baillie’s work. My Tears Are Dry is actually an homage to All My Life, one of the first experimental films that I saw and which moved me deeply. I thought about how something so apparently simple can be so transporting. My Tears Are Dry is also made as an homage to Los Angeles and its contradictions as a Utopian destination and a place with an erased history. In order to refer to All My Life (which is also song by Ella Fitzgerald), instead of having a title card that said ‘homage to …’, I worked with a graphic designer who copied the design of the titles for the Baillie film. The titles seem to refer more to the Ella Fitzgerald song he uses than the film itself, and I followed the same steps with mine.
I’m interested in filmmakers – such as James Benning, Hollis Frampton and Morgan Fisher – who engage with materiality and process. Fisher’s work is fascinating to me in the way it takes apart commercial films from the inside with a combination of exquisite humour and exactitude. In terms of using music, I am influenced by Kenneth Anger, Lewis Klahr and Peggy Ahwesh. Peggy’s work is also a great influence to me in its articulation of a feminine position and an investment in pleasure.
DF What are you currently working on?
LL I just finished a new film, The Room Called Heaven (2012), and I am in the process of transferring it to video and getting it ready to go. I am also in pre-production for a new shoot that will first involve some time spent in nearby surrounding landscapes in early December. - http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/focus-interview-laida-lertxundi/
Focus Interview: Laida Lertxundi
The Los Angeles-based filmmaker discusses cities, soundtracks and landscapes
The Room Called Heaven, 2012, 16mm film stills
I’m a sucker for film soundtracks. When a filmmaker wants me to feel
something that can be expressed through music, I am putty in their
hands. The first Laida Lertxundi film I saw – My Tears Are Dry
(2009), at the 2012 Whitney Biennial – caught my attention with its use
of Hoagy Lands’s heart-crushing 1961 soul ballad of the same name. As in
many of Lertxundi’s films, music gives the domestic space it depicts a
heavy charge that balances the pleasures of pop with a reflexive
awareness of the role of sound in cinema. Glowing southern Californian
light saturates her works, films that articulate the connections between
domesticity and landscape, and how technology gives shape and colour to
our place in them.Dan Fox What’s your relationship to California? Films such as Footnotes to a House of Love (2007), My Tears Are Dry, and A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) depict apartments and domestic spaces, but they also feel like hymns to Los Angeles and the landscape around it.
Laida Lertxundi I treat Los Angeles and its surrounding areas as a subject in my films. To make films here is to enter into dialogue with the misrepresentations of the city that Hollywood creates: we share the same space, history and, to a certain extent, the same resources. My approach is non-spectacular; I want to present Los Angeles as a lived-in place. In a city with little public space, this becomes about the intimacy of interior spaces and the magnitude of open landscapes. I like to define the work as ‘landscape plus’: the natural environments in my films are being altered by people and objects that operate as a kind of demarcation or interference in the land, creating an image of the filmmaker in the landscape.
DF Can you talk about your use of music? Songs by Hoagy Lands, The Shangri-Las, Robert Wyatt and James Carr all appear in your films, cut together in ways that suggest more than ‘mere’ soundtracks.
LL Part of mediating the landscape is making a soundtrack within in it in real time. I insist on using diegetic music, which places its source on or off screen. Even when we can identify the source of music on screen, it has power over our emotional field but it refers to itself as a part of a whole.
I want to expose the process of making a soundtrack, never treating music as a background to images. I treat it as a material, often seen as well as heard. At times, it enters into a conflict with the image or gets desynchronized. The music recordings are made live during shooting and sound is always recorded from another source – for example, a record player, CD or monitor – with the sounds of that particular environment: traffic, street noise, or sounds that occur out in nature such as birds, or the loud hum of an aeroplane. Because there are people in my films, there is often a question of whether I am engaging in narrative or fiction. But there is none. Narrative is replaced by sound and image relationships, compositions that lean more towards music than film narrative.
DF What’s your relationship to analogue technology? Aside from the fact your films are shot on celluloid, they also feature record players, tape recorders, radios and TVs – technology of the late 20th century rather than the digital 21st.
LL There is a precariousness to working on 16mm and I like to refer to this by using analogue sound-making devices within my films. In Footnotes to a House of Love, My Tears Are Dry and particularly in Cry When it Happens / Llora Cuando Te Pase (2010), these are breaking, slowing down – instruments are missing a key or are slightly out of tune. I use all these things as a reflection of 16mm itself – obsolete or breaking down but still going. That said, all my editing and, very importantly, my sound is mixed digitally. There is also a DVD player in Cry When it Happens, so we can’t say that the work is strictly analogue or digital. It is more accurate to say that technologies from different times are made to work together. There is a relationship between these machines breaking and the themes of heartbreak and loss that often appear in the music I use, both drawing a picture of a world that is falling apart. This unsteadiness is also the point where something new can be made.
DF What filmmakers have influenced you? My Tears Are Dry is wonderfully redolent of another Californian filmmaker, Bruce Baillie, whose films such as All My Life and Castro Street (both 1966) are portraits of places and moods.
LL I’m glad you draw a connection to Baillie’s work. My Tears Are Dry is actually an homage to All My Life, one of the first experimental films that I saw and which moved me deeply. I thought about how something so apparently simple can be so transporting. My Tears Are Dry is also made as an homage to Los Angeles and its contradictions as a Utopian destination and a place with an erased history. In order to refer to All My Life (which is also song by Ella Fitzgerald), instead of having a title card that said ‘homage to …’, I worked with a graphic designer who copied the design of the titles for the Baillie film. The titles seem to refer more to the Ella Fitzgerald song he uses than the film itself, and I followed the same steps with mine.
I’m interested in filmmakers – such as James Benning, Hollis Frampton and Morgan Fisher – who engage with materiality and process. Fisher’s work is fascinating to me in the way it takes apart commercial films from the inside with a combination of exquisite humour and exactitude. In terms of using music, I am influenced by Kenneth Anger, Lewis Klahr and Peggy Ahwesh. Peggy’s work is also a great influence to me in its articulation of a feminine position and an investment in pleasure.
DF What are you currently working on?
LL I just finished a new film, The Room Called Heaven (2012), and I am in the process of transferring it to video and getting it ready to go. I am also in pre-production for a new shoot that will first involve some time spent in nearby surrounding landscapes in early December. - http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/focus-interview-laida-lertxundi/
