‘I SEE, YOU MEAN’ (working title) is a new body of research on the narrative film form, developed against the continuity model that dominates narrative cinema – a philosophy of the invisible, in which story is meant to reach an audience seamlessly, without any awareness of form. The project turns instead towards a cinema of the visible.
Taking Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz’s essay ‘For a Shamanic Cinema’ as a starting point, the research looks at film practices whose narrative structures arise from playful or rigorous engagement with form itself. Story is treated as shape: diagrams mapping the narrative structures of a selection of artist and auteur films become primitive scripts for an expanded cinema installation.
This approach, described as ‘Landscape Plus’, involves filming in natural landscapes with non-actors and unrehearsed sound – live music, text readings, field recordings – edited through a fragmentary structure that replaces conventional narration with a focus on process and materiality.
Laida Lertxundi is a Spanish artist, filmmaker, and professor of fine arts based in the United States and the Basque Country.
