Courtisane presents:
Laida Lertxundi: Films and influences
Monday February 13, 2012, 20:30h
OFFoff Cinema, Gent (Belgium)

Courtisane is proud to present for the first time in Belgium a survey of the work of Laida Lertxundi (Spain, 1981), one of the most talented young filmmakers working in the tradition of the avant-garde today. Lertxundi makes 16mm films with non-actors often shot within and around Los Angeles, where she’s been living for a number of years. Her films evoke external and internal spaces of intimacy, questioning how viewers’ desires and expectations are shaped by cinematic forms of storytelling, and searching for alternative ways of linking sound and music with found parameters, constructed situations and everyday environments. In recent years her work has been widely shown at festivals and venues such as MoMa, LACMA, the Viennale, the Rotterdam International Film Festival or the BFI London Film Festival. After having screened Cry When It Happens last year in the competition programme, Courtisane will once again showcase Lertxundi’s work during the coming Courtisane festival (21-25 March 2012), with the screening of her latest short film, A Lax Riddle Unit, which premiered last October at Views of the Avant-Garde during the New York Film Festival. As a prologue to this year’s festival, Courtisane will present at OFFoff four films by Lertxundi together with a selection of works by other filmmakers that have inspired her practice.

Light Industry: Charles Atlas's Torse
Tuesday, January 24 2012, 19h
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, 11222 New York

If there can be said to be a subject of Torse, Merce Cunningham’s remarkable and remarkably difficult 1976 dance, it is the torso. But though every imaginable position of the back and backbone is in evidence, the torso is here as much a point of departure as it is an object of inquiry. (Indeed, the dance taxed every element of the body: “My calves were in contraction for about three years,” said Ellen Cornfield, a dancer who was part of its original cast.)

Charles Atlas’s 1977 film of Torse is an achievement in itself, a significant example of Atlas and Cunningham’s unique approach using film or video to “see” choreography. Atlas shot the dance with three 16mm cameras over the course of three days at the University of Washington, where the company was then in residence. Two mobile cameras captured close-ups, while a single stationary camera was set up for long shots. Atlas and Cunningham manned the mobile cameras while a technician handled the static camera, and the results were edited by Atlas into a single, two-screen film that was originally shown via a now all-but-extinct dual-interlock 16mm projection system.

The fifty-five-minute work features music by pioneering composer Maryanne Amacher and costumes by the company’s longtime designer, Mark Lancaster. As was typical in Cunningham’s practice, the choreography and sound were made separately, so that any relationship between music and movement is serendipitous. Torse is also notable as an instance of Cunningham’s use of chance operations; the choreography comprises sixty-four distinct phrases, and the floor space is divided into sixty-four squares—a reference to the number of hexagrams in the I Ching. Cunningham created separate “space charts” and “movement charts” and tossed coins to determine the combinations for the ten dancers (Cornfield, Karole Armitage, Lisa Fox, Meg Harper, and Robert Kovich are among those who appear in the film). The result is, as Arlene Croce once described it, “monomaniacally urgent.” That, and something else: one felicitous decision after another, a sublime study in the intersection of rigor and contingency.