Autoficción (Laida Lertxundi, 2020) (Patreon)

Although they average between ten and fifteen minutes long, the films of Laida Lertxundi fall into the category that I have discussed elsewhere as "small films." There is quite a lot to unpack in any given film of Lertxundi's. They are rich texts, and her deceptively inviting, sun-drenched visual style makes them particularly enjoyable to revisit. Lertxundi's work always seems to capture the tone of southern California in the late 1970s, at least as it was so often depicted in the independent cinema of the era. And yet there is nothing "retro" or nostalgic about these films.

Instead, they seem to represent parts of an aesthetic puzzle, but ones that do not lock together to form a complete picture. This is what I mean by "small films." They certainly possess formal integrity taken on their own. But each Lertxundi films bounces off the others in provocative ways, more like a suite of paintings than a series of films, exactly. They all seem to issue forth from a highly original, deeply defined creative zone: "Laidaland."

Other Lertxundi films have incorporated autobiographical elements, often in oblique ways. Her film A Lax Riddle Unit, for example, takes its title from an anagram of the filmmaker's own name. Vivir papra Vivir / Live to Live actually begins with the artist's EEG, her brainwaves in essence "drawing" the opening scene. And one of her most formally meticulous works, 025 Sunset Red, adapts material borrowed from Lertxundi's father, a Spanish Marxist academic. So in a sense, discovering that the newest Lertxundi film is entitled Autoficción is in no way surprising. 

And yet, there is an irony in this title, since Autoficción is one of Lertxundi's most deliberately open works, one that disperses its subject position across many different women and situations. For one thing, Lertxundi combines brief monologues by various young women with documentary images from a street parade in Compton, California, one which involves civil rights activists, union workers, and police. Through careful editing and framing, Autoficción establishes a dialogue between the relatively private statements made by the young women and the more public assertions of identity and power. 

The cumulative result is that, when one woman talks about her complicated identity as a young mother, or another woman talks about learning to be more comfortable by herself, these subjective grapplings are framed both within, and as coextensive with, larger social and political struggles. Through montage, Lertxundi brings these women's individual situations together, and more fully contextualizes them -- cinema as intersectional consciousness raising, if you like.

So when we see images such as three women against an apartment wall, under a projection of freeway traffic, or (above), a body fragmented by a traveling matte, we can see that Autoficción is both asking us to consider how women are imaged by cinema, but also how careful, intelligent filmmaking can put women's images back together again, editing the personal back into the political.

We tend to think of "fiction" as prose that is comprised of made-up stories. But at its most basic, "fiction" means something that is made. So "autofiction" is not simply telling a story about oneself. It is the active process of self-fashioning, of taking responsibility for one's own subjectivity. As Lertxundi shows time and again, film is one way to literally reconnect ourselves to ourselves, to splice together radical new selves.