A Lax Riddle Unit
2011, 6min, 16mm, color, sound
Camera, Editing, Directing: Laida Lertxundi
Sound: George Clark, Laida Lertxundi
Sound Mix: Ezra Buchla
Music: James Carr, Robert Wyatt
with: Josette Chiang
Typography: Lucas Quigley
Thanks: Dan Boer, Patrick Friel,
Christina C. Nguyen, C.W. Winter,
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Thom Andersen
and Mark McElhatten
In a Los Angeles interior, moving walls for loss. Practicing a song to a loved one. A film of the feminine structuring body.
“Laida Lertxundi’s A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) also shows a series of gentle transformations. Each of the film’s turns reveals a surprise: a woman suddenly appearing in bed, and, from behind an album cover, her shy smile. With the film’s elements of Los Angeles landscape, houseplants, and James Carr’s plaintive “Love Attack,” continually rearranged like the letters of the title, which is an anagram for Lertxundi’s own name, there is the sense of kaleidoscopic rotation, breathtaking views made with the slightest of movements: changing light, cuts, and slowly revolving camera pans.”
– Genevieve Yue, reverseshot.com
“A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) opens on the curled lip of James Carr’s soul number “Love Attack” and a cragged landscape view. The long take floods with softening light, but then a terrifically decisive cut deposits us in the flat light of an apartment. The sudden switch bears the imprint of both insight and displacement. Leafy potted plants reach for the natural light framed in a window, and Carr’s wail gives way to Robert Wyatt’s impressionism: a different emotional architecture entirely. The camera turns slow pirouettes through the apartment, passing over an amplifier (always this confusion about the relationship between sight and sound), a woman kneeling to play a keyboard, some records, and then catching up with her again sprawled in bed.
As is often the case in Lertxundi’s films, the composition does not settle on the human form in the usual way. The residue of the apartment, oddly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), develops until a few shots later we end with a bleeding red dusk spreading across Los Angeles — an image pitched on the edge of surrender.”
– Max Goldberg, San Francsico Bay Guardian
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2011, 6min, 16mm, color, sound
Camera, Editing, Directing: Laida Lertxundi
Sound: George Clark, Laida Lertxundi
Sound Mix: Ezra Buchla
Music: James Carr, Robert Wyatt
with: Josette Chiang
Typography: Lucas Quigley
Thanks: Dan Boer, Patrick Friel,
Christina C. Nguyen, C.W. Winter,
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Thom Andersen
and Mark McElhatten
In a Los Angeles interior, moving walls for loss. Practicing a song to a loved one. A film of the feminine structuring body.
“Laida Lertxundi’s A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) also shows a series of gentle transformations. Each of the film’s turns reveals a surprise: a woman suddenly appearing in bed, and, from behind an album cover, her shy smile. With the film’s elements of Los Angeles landscape, houseplants, and James Carr’s plaintive “Love Attack,” continually rearranged like the letters of the title, which is an anagram for Lertxundi’s own name, there is the sense of kaleidoscopic rotation, breathtaking views made with the slightest of movements: changing light, cuts, and slowly revolving camera pans.”
– Genevieve Yue, reverseshot.com
“A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) opens on the curled lip of James Carr’s soul number “Love Attack” and a cragged landscape view. The long take floods with softening light, but then a terrifically decisive cut deposits us in the flat light of an apartment. The sudden switch bears the imprint of both insight and displacement. Leafy potted plants reach for the natural light framed in a window, and Carr’s wail gives way to Robert Wyatt’s impressionism: a different emotional architecture entirely. The camera turns slow pirouettes through the apartment, passing over an amplifier (always this confusion about the relationship between sight and sound), a woman kneeling to play a keyboard, some records, and then catching up with her again sprawled in bed.
As is often the case in Lertxundi’s films, the composition does not settle on the human form in the usual way. The residue of the apartment, oddly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), develops until a few shots later we end with a bleeding red dusk spreading across Los Angeles — an image pitched on the edge of surrender.”
– Max Goldberg, San Francsico Bay Guardian
back