Lucca Lutzky and Jimmy Lux-Fox’s Film Is an Ode to Mundanity

In his 1974 book Species of Spaces and other Pieces, French writer Georges Perec coined the neologism: “infra ordinary”. As opposed to the spectacular, the writer was – as the term suggests – fascinated by the mundane: the things that unfold between seconds, the moments overlooked or missed – moments of completely perfect ordinariness that pass by unnoticed, unseen, unquestioned. 

It’s these moments filled with absence – absence of the spectacular – that artists Lucca Lutzky and Jimmy Lux-Fox explore in their first collaborative film “Fragments, Segments, Vestiges”. Across 27 minutes, the 16mm film brings together ten acts that each respond to a prose poem, each more surreal and yet strangely ordinary than the last: eyes blinking into each other, lashes interlocked; a woman crying on the floor of an abandoned hospital; a man upon a hill awaiting the sound of footsteps of the woman he desires; an elderly couple interlocked in a naked embrace.

Each scene, staged within the unnerving ambience of a desolate environment, is led by silence of the performers – Devon Ross, Sonny Hall and David Morrissey, to name a few. Piercing through the silence of the scenes is a looping guitar feedback from an original score by Thurston Moore. It’s this absence of sound that charges the scenes with a certain eerienes, a certain unease that intensifies the poetic nature of the so-called “infra-ordinary”.  Within this stillness, led by the prose narratives written by Lux-Fox, the disparate scenes are interwoven to form a fragmented collection of love, loss and longing.

The film is translated into book form, held physically between two covers, published by Ayvan. Each limited edition publication contains an original fragment of the 16mm negative on which the project was shot – a vestige, a trace, of the two artists’ minds working together. 

Ahead of the public screening on 2nd November at Ladbroke Hall in West London, SLEEK speaks to the artists about their collaboration, process and the beauty that can be found within the mundane. 

SLEEK: This was the first collaboration between you both. What prompted it?

Lucca: We met in 2018. Our friendship really grew through us going to film screenings and sharing art together. Overtime, we started to make video performances and I quickly understood there were a lot of similarities between Jimmy’s visual, written and film work. I’d catch a glimpse of something he’d be working on, as would he of my work. We decided that we wanted to make a film in a way that really brings our two minds together. 

S: What was your process?

L: Before we even had a concept, we started with a lot of creative exercises through writing that would allow us to understand how we would translate it visually. One of the exercises, which Jimmy had been doing for a while, was writing a bunch of 100 word 5 line stories. The stories, or scenes, were always kind of talking about something fleeting, something banal. I realised that within those stories there was this fragmented narrative, the sort of spaces in between things. I started to consider how to bring visual elements to those pieces. It became a real back and forth. At the beginning of the film, there’s a shot of two eyes blinking into each other. They’re actually mine and Jimmy’s eyes. It kind of explains us trying to merge our minds together. 

Jimmy: We’re both fans of Roy Andersson, that sort of very reduced and devoid of feeling cinema. There was something really interesting about writing something that didn’t really contain a narrative, or stopping short of the fall. Instead, we wanted to build a narrative out of little bits – a space between stories. It turns out you can really make something coherent and meaningful out of the things that are usually discarded. 

S: Or forgotten. The film itself feels very human. A very beautiful take on the totally banal aspects of life.

J: It’s the moments of total earnestness that are usually seen as unimportant. Yet, it can actually foreclose something much more honest. 

L: We wanted to romanticise those moments too, just a little. We were very particular about where we were shooting and who we were casting, especially since we had a very limited amount of film. It became very performative in the sense that we really set the space, and allowed the actor to play out our ideas by giving them one simple action, a simple feeling. It was important to not give the actor too much, only pieces. 

S: Fragments.

Lucca: Yes, exactly. 

S: Let’s go onto the title: Fragments, Segments, Vestiges – three words that have a similar meaning. The one with the most apt definition in relation to the film however is “vestiges”: a trace or remnant of something that is disappearing or no longer exists. You explore this idea through interpersonal relationships. Often, there’s two people within a scene. But even in the scenes where it’s just one person physically, there’s still this longing, this yearning for a second person – that somehow makes them present.

J: Yeah, I hadn’t really realised that actually. With the scene of Sonny Hall in the field, he’s alone but he’s waiting for someone. There’s this idea of a second character. When I was writing, a huge inspiration was What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. It has this same element of arriving at the beginning of a narrative and then ending in this very minimal, anticlimactic way. 

L: The absence of anything really happening is what really draws you in. There’s a frequency that exists within these spaces we’ve created – a sort of voyage into something that can’t quite be grasped. We both have a very romantic way of looking at things. You know, looking at someone from across the street and then feeling a sense of loneliness in our observation. Jimmy and I always talk in fragments, we’re always stuck in bits of memories. We’re both fascinated by the emotion in ordinary observation. Then this idea of traces, the things we’re leaving behind is the film itself. The film is what we’re leaving behind in capturing these moments. 

S: There’s an absence of any spoken word. Instead, a score by Thurston Moore underpins each act along with the natural, ordinary sounds within the scene. Why did you decide on no spoken word?

Lucca: I think it all came from us being interested in the least amount of information to create a narrative. There wasn’t any moment that we felt words were necessary. Even with the poems, they’re not direct translations of what you see visually on the screen. We were more interested in the feelings within those narratives.

S: I found it so interesting to see the poem first, and then have a visual response presented to me. There was one particular one about a woman who really wanted to go dancing, and the man she’s with doesn’t think it’s a good idea and instead encourages them to go home. In my head, I’d created my own interpretation of a younger couple at a bar – but in fact the actual scene presents an older couple who lie in bed naked together. It was striking. It makes you realise that everything we feel is subjective and yet so universal at the same time. 

Lucca: Exactly. It was an exercise in trying to explore these narratives and dialogues in ways we might not initially see ourselves. 

J: It’s interesting to see text and then a visual image drawn from an element of that text directly after. It’s an opportunity to experience a particular relationship between text and visual languages. 

S: You structured the film through ten separate acts that each correspond to a prose poem. Why this structure?

L: I guess we really wanted the film to have the ability to be played on a loop which removes any sort of linear structure, mirroring the form of the prose narratives themselves. We also knew we wanted to present it physically in space, which we’ll be doing publicly on November 2nd at Ladbroke Hall. There’s this idea that we’re creating a moment, an experience, a fragment of a life.