Cry When it Happens / Llora Cuando Te Pase
2010, 14 min, 16mm
Camera, Editing, Directing: Laida Lertxundi
Sound: Dan Boer, Lindsey Hoffmann, Laida Lertxundi,
Albert Ortega, Lucas Quigley
Sound mix: Ezra Buchla
Music: Beethoven, Black Velvet, The Blue Rondos,
Laura Steenberge
Typography: Lucas Quigley
With: Lindsey Hoffmann, Beau Johnson, Laura Merando,
Albert Ortega, Tanya Rubbak, Laura Steenberge
Location: Los Angeles Benton Montaña de Oro
San Luis Obispo, California, USA
Thank you: Thom Andersen, Betzy Bromberg,
Mark McElhatten, C.W. Winter
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.
“Cry When It Happens, one of three films at last year's New York Film Festival that seemed vital. Like Uncle Boonmee and Film Socialisme, Cry sees characters with their vision subsumed in the portholes of dingy technology-and eventually takes on their perspective. In the first image, two girls splay on a couch, antiparallel but touching, vaguely grinning, with the light intensified on their arms and faces. Already the film's both naturalistic, with feeling—a delimited space, real-time hold, physical respite, sense of the bodies touching cloth on all sides—and slightly surreal: their sense of comfort, huddling, belied by the unnecessarily tight squeeze. Eventually two figures in an LA motel room watch TV footage of the sky while one fingers an accordion, and some minutes later, that sky footage becomes the film itself, God's heavens accompanied by the Blue Rondos' "Little Baby."
The song becomes a signal of real-world culture and time against the sky, and every time the movie offers a transformative sight it's inevitably mediated by the physical realities of a blinking TV and preset sound-loop, like a sidekick that won't shut up channeling the transcendental. Lertxundi is precise in her abstraction; her cuts back and forth from the sky to the motel are like the Wallace Stevens rhyme schemes in which the words won't rhyme, but are repeated thuddingly untransformed. Her TV's not different from Stevens's jar in Tennessee—"It took dominion every where/ The jar was gray and bare"—at once both all-encompassing and physically self-contained. Shot-by-shot, like Stevens line-by-line, Lertxundi probably has a better sense of bodily relations, suburban detail, and epic landscape, spaces rising deep in the frame instead of receding, than anyone in America, but her accumulation of precisions makes a through line of disembodied gazes, very much of 2011, in which each portal seems to lead forward or back to the next.”
– David Phelps, The L Magazine
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2010, 14 min, 16mm
Camera, Editing, Directing: Laida Lertxundi
Sound: Dan Boer, Lindsey Hoffmann, Laida Lertxundi,
Albert Ortega, Lucas Quigley
Sound mix: Ezra Buchla
Music: Beethoven, Black Velvet, The Blue Rondos,
Laura Steenberge
Typography: Lucas Quigley
With: Lindsey Hoffmann, Beau Johnson, Laura Merando,
Albert Ortega, Tanya Rubbak, Laura Steenberge
Location: Los Angeles Benton Montaña de Oro
San Luis Obispo, California, USA
Thank you: Thom Andersen, Betzy Bromberg,
Mark McElhatten, C.W. Winter
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.
“Cry When It Happens, one of three films at last year's New York Film Festival that seemed vital. Like Uncle Boonmee and Film Socialisme, Cry sees characters with their vision subsumed in the portholes of dingy technology-and eventually takes on their perspective. In the first image, two girls splay on a couch, antiparallel but touching, vaguely grinning, with the light intensified on their arms and faces. Already the film's both naturalistic, with feeling—a delimited space, real-time hold, physical respite, sense of the bodies touching cloth on all sides—and slightly surreal: their sense of comfort, huddling, belied by the unnecessarily tight squeeze. Eventually two figures in an LA motel room watch TV footage of the sky while one fingers an accordion, and some minutes later, that sky footage becomes the film itself, God's heavens accompanied by the Blue Rondos' "Little Baby."
The song becomes a signal of real-world culture and time against the sky, and every time the movie offers a transformative sight it's inevitably mediated by the physical realities of a blinking TV and preset sound-loop, like a sidekick that won't shut up channeling the transcendental. Lertxundi is precise in her abstraction; her cuts back and forth from the sky to the motel are like the Wallace Stevens rhyme schemes in which the words won't rhyme, but are repeated thuddingly untransformed. Her TV's not different from Stevens's jar in Tennessee—"It took dominion every where/ The jar was gray and bare"—at once both all-encompassing and physically self-contained. Shot-by-shot, like Stevens line-by-line, Lertxundi probably has a better sense of bodily relations, suburban detail, and epic landscape, spaces rising deep in the frame instead of receding, than anyone in America, but her accumulation of precisions makes a through line of disembodied gazes, very much of 2011, in which each portal seems to lead forward or back to the next.”
– David Phelps, The L Magazine
download press release
back