Sunday March 27, 2011, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Long Live Our Love: New Works by Laida Lertxundi, Michael Robinson, and Ben Russell

Laida Lertxundi & Michael Robinson in person!

Multiple Los Angeles premieres!

There is a bright light flickering out from far beyond that half-blue horizon [1], there is sea-breeze and the distant ache of a desert wind blowing [2].  We are here, and together we look hard into the landscape that we’ve built up around us – it is at once a broken television [3], a neon sign [4], an upward pan that leaves us in a cloudless sky [5].  We are here and we are lost: wood-wandering, leaving marks on trees for guides [6].  We’ve been masked and jungled, guided by spirits that are strong [7] but not stronger than each of us together.  Oh!  We have song and bell and bird as map, and with you and you lying next to me [8], it is certainly all we need: Long Live Our Love!

[1] Trypps#7 (Badlands) by Ben Russell
[2] Cry When it Happens by Laida Lertxundi
[3] Light Is Waiting by Michael Robinson
[4] Trypps#5 (Dubai) by Ben Russell
[5] My Tears Are Dry by Laida Lertxundi
[6] If There Be Thorns by Michael Robinson
[7] Trypps#6 (Malobi) by Ben Russell
[8] Footnotes to a House of Love by Laida Lertxundi

Trypps #7 (Badlands), by Ben Russell (2010, Super16mm, 10:00)
Los Angeles premiere!
“Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape.  Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell's unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.”- Michael Green, MCA Chicago

Cry When It Happens, by Laida Lertxundi  (2010, Spain / USA 16mm, solor, sound, 14 minutes)

Los Angeles premiere!

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. Music: Beethoven, Black Velvet, The Blue Rondos, Laura Steenberge

Light is Waiting, by Michael Robinson (2007, digital video, 11:20)

A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.

Trypps #5 (Dubai), by Ben Russell (2008, 16mm, silent, 3:00)
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"A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and
phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism." - BR

My Tears Are Dry, by Laida Lertxundi (2009, USA/Spain,16mm, color, sound, 4 min)

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.

If There Be Thorns, by Michael Robinson (2009, 16mm color film transferred to digital video, 13:20)

Los Angeles premiere!

A dark wave of incest and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole.  Taking its title from the V.C. Andrews novel (a sequel to "Flowers In The Attic"), and weaving together texts from Shirley Jackson, William S. Burroughs, and Stevie Nicks, the film constructs a collaged narrative of three star-crossed siblings searching for one another across the unstable landscapes of their respective exiles. 

Trypps #6 (Malobi), by Ben Russell (2009, 16mm, 12:00)
Los Angeles premiere!
“Part journey, part psychedelic flight of fancy, and all in all a purposeful break in rhythm, Ben Russell’s latest “trip,” Trypps #6 (Malobi), is a work of ecstatic ethnography.  Clearly indebted to Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres fous, a midcentury document of West African Hauka mystics exorcising the demons of their colonial overlords, Russell
allows his camera to fall into a similar hypnosis... In a single, weightless steadicam shot, Russell swings around trees and houses, circling around the main event instead of directly approaching it.  While the villagers flurry themselves into an orgiastic danse macabre,
which Russell joins only at the very end, his concentration leads elsewhere to the sustained revelation of unflinching vision itself.”
– Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot

Footnotes to a House of Love, by Laida Lertxundi (2007, 16mm, color, sound, 13 min)

A series of shots in a California desert landscape in which there is a play between on frame and off frame, sound and image. There is an effort to create the space of a story, without a story, by the use of real time/diegetic sound. Love is felt as a force that determines the arrangement of the figures in the landscape.

Music: Leslie Gore, Ari Up, The Kinks, The Shangri-Las, Henry Flynt, Laura Steenberge and The Crystals.

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.  Click here to purchase!

Michael Robinson will be doing another, different program at REDCAT on Monday, Mach 28, 8:30 pm.

Special Thanks to Adam Levine, REDCAT, and Cal Arts.

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.