There is more than a hint of melancholy—the end of a love story, the vistas of urban decline—and a quiet suggestion that all things are fleeting in this world, that film is an uncertain way of preserving the flickering sensations of the quotidian. Perhaps at moments I found myself frustrated by this: wanting perhaps a less polished version of reality, a greater acceptance of the grimy tedium of going about our lives, the messiness and unfinished quality of the day-to-day. But this unfinished quality is reflected in the form of the work, the ongoing development of the project, which—like any attempt to capture the experience of rotating through the years—remains necessarily tentative and unresolved, and contains moments of real beauty.

Laida Lertxundi’s Inner Outer Space, her first film since returning to her native Basque Country after spending decades living in Southern California, is a triptych of interconnected short works—Teatrillo, Inner Outer Space and Under the Nothing Night. As with Lertxundi’s previous work, this is a film that probes the relationship between sound and image, between photography and film, between landscape and individual. To some degree Inner Outer Space feels like a film about learning how to make a film again, for the first time, in a new environment. After a career spent immersed in the geography around Los Angeles, Lertxundi’s most recent work is an attempt to come to terms with a new space—both topographical and psychological. It is a response to the strange twin-movement of dislocation and home-coming, and the result is a work that unfolds almost tentatively: beginning with a series of images placed in and cycled through uncertain and opaque relations to each other, before moving to a blindfolded woman trying to describe the landscape she’s been placed in solely from the sounds and sensations on her skin, then concluding with the final chapter, in which two women in bathing suits perform a slow choreography in front of a projection of crashing waves—trapped between the image and its projection—soundtracked by an obscure British psychedelia record (Complex’s “Am I”): a long, exuberant release of some ambivalent feeling, one that seems to resist easy translation into language.

Lertxundi has described her practice as “Landscape Plus”: her films are shot on 16mm in natural landscapes, and involve the introduction of ‘unnatural’ elements into these spaces—live or pre-recorded music, non-actors reading texts, field recordings and the capturing of accidental sound. Her works are preoccupied with the textures of everyday life but they refuse a realist approach, resulting in something closer to fantasy or dream: the kind which takes place in some familiar setting, suddenly distorted through the lens of blurry recollection, involving an unconscious personal mapping of a place, or an experience that hinges on the presence of some workaday object that suddenly takes on a significance and is changed, as if you’re seeing it for the first time. In Inner Outer Space we see people try to describe or draw the terrains they have found themselves in, a way of taking the external world inside, a way of making it their own, building a personal relationship to it in order to recreate or capture the oblique feelings that the natural world can evoke. By defamiliarising the locations and sensations of everyday life, Lertxundi’s work elevates the mundane into the realm of the oneiric. Through this process, her work returns to us an experience of space and embodiment; it refuses glib resolution or easy answers and presents us instead with something far more opaque, radical and transformative. 

Another work in the festival programme, Ana Vaz’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, is named for the Wallace Stevens poem which is recited in both English and Portuguese in the film—a poem which takes on a structuring role in the Vaz work. The film is the product of a period of experimental pedagogy; a collaboration between the filmmaker and some high school students developed over the course of a year, beginning as a state commission under the rubric of “Unschool”. The work documents the development of this practice emerging through the participation of its teenaged interlocutors: we see them, wearing Black Sabbath or Marvel Comics tee-shirts, ripped jeans, fresh acne on their faces, a little unsure about themselves and each other, awkwardly laughing, whispering to each other—normal high schoolers—being introduced to techniques like using a contact microphone to record the hum reverberating through a lamppost. They are given a camera and sent out to film whatever they want, and then asked why they filmed it like that, what they intend to do with the images. They ask a series of questions: What is perspective? What is the world? What is vision? How to see the world with another’s eyes? What are images? What are landscapes? How do you cut landscapes?

Vaz’s collaboration with these high schoolers feels like an experiment in the truest sense of the word: a process conducted to find something out, with the outcome not known in advance. Taking its leads from Stevens’ high modernist concern with the vagaries of perception, we see here the opening-up of aesthetic possibilities—a derailment of the anaesthetising effects of habit by encouraging a new attention towards places and things that the participants might take for granted. How strange it is, as a teenager, to go to your school when nobody else is there, and to see the empty buildings, devoid of their usual activity, and to record the hallways and staircases, which wouldn’t usually register as objects of interest. There is an almost utopian instinct at work in this kind of pedagogy and its results, the hope that by instilling in these young people some new aesthetic sensibility—as well as the techniques to practice and develop it—the hard crust of everyday looking could be broken, and new perspectives and attitudes could bloom. The camera becomes a pencil, sketching out something that can be revised, altered, or erased. Vaz’s film leaves us without answers or closure, but with a set of questions that suggest paths forward into further experiment.

In the essay quoted at the beginning of this essay, Perec wrote: “It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.” Through paying attention to the things we may typically dismiss as trivial or futile, we can begin to find out what is really essential. This process is potentially unending, reflecting the ways in which the cycles of the everyday refuse completion and finality. All of filmmakers discussed here seem to recognise the need for a practice which is a process of opening-up, of refusing closure or easy, definitive answers. They ask the same challenging questions that Perec raised in the 1970s—Where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?