Laida Lertxundi






My Tears Are Dry
2009, 4 min, 16mm

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. (LL)

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     Camera, editing, directing: Laida Lertxundi
     Sound: Laida Lertxundi, Lucas Quigley
     Music: Laura Steenberge, Hoagy Lands
     With: Tanya Rubbak, Laura Steenberge
     Location: Los Angeles, California

"In 1966, the film-maker Bruce Baillie made All My Life, a simple, absorbing, powerful evocation of eternal time and space, contained in just one take: a voyage along a fence that eventually went up as far as the blue sky, whilst the music of Ella Fitzgerald was playing. With My Tears Are Dry, Laida Lertxundi pays homage to the master, whilst also proposing a sonorous dialogue between the electronic and the acoustic. A young woman, lying on a bed, plays on her cassette recorder and then stops a song by Hoagy Lands whilst another woman (perhaps miles away, or perhaps in the same room) experiments with the strings of her guitar. In the end the song is heard uninterruptedly, and at that moment there is an intimate emotional explosion. The luminosity, a key feature of Lertxundi's films, in its most concise and essential form."
-Javier Estrada pdf

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