Local Music: Sound and Localism in Laida Lertxundi’s Cinema

This article looks at short experimental works by the Spanish-American filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, focusing in particular on Footnotes to a House of Love (2007). The author proposes that Lertxundi’s practice can best be situated between two opposing tendencies. On the one hand, the films under examination are structural; they engage in self-reflexive demystification of their methods of production. Lertxundi deals with the mechanisms and material of the cinematic apparatus itself: editing, composition, projection, celluloid reels. On the other hand, however, her films are sentimental and affective, filled with emotion, love and human bodies. The article concludes that this dialectic is present also – and above all – at the level of music. Lertxundi processes and deforms her music, yet she just as often surrenders herself to it.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!