With their first collaborative film, Fragments, Segments, Vestiges, artists Lucca Lutzky and Jimmy Lux-Fox gently capture situations untethered from beginnings or endings. The film is divided into ten acts, each prefaced by a poem written by Lux-Fox, describing a moment, calling for the rhythm of language to stir imagination. Captured on 16mm film, together, the film runs across 27 minutes, leading viewers through dreamy vignettes portraying fragments of emotion across different lives observed in the absence of dialogue or conventional storytelling.

Two pairs of eyelashes entangled in a dance, a young man walking alone through the tall grass of a windy field, a woman in the backseat of a convertible freely contorting her body as the wind whips against her hair. Moments are intimate, ethereal and elevated with utmost importance. The project is also documented in a special edition book which will be sold at the installation, featuring selected stills and writings, along with a fragment of the 16mm film.

Tying the acts together is an original score by Thurston Moore, a guitar feedback loop that becomes a recurring current throughout the course of the film. The project includes performances by David Morrissey, Sonny Hall, Devon Ross, Rupert Everett and Susie Cave, and will be installed at Ladbroke Hall in London from 1st – 2nd November.

J.L. Sirisuk: I’ve been hearing about the evolution of this project for a while now. To start, how did the two of you meet?
Lucca Lutzky: We met at a screening at The ICA in London. It was maybe four years ago.

JLS: Did you already sense that creative connection?
LL: Since the beginning, we always bonded through showing each other things like music and art. From very early on, we started understanding we had similar tastes. We always talked about different creative projects and different creative expressions together and we’ve always understood each other in that way.

JLS: Where did the idea for the project originate from?
Jimmy Lux-Fox: The first thing that happened was I started writing the short stories, seeing how short the story could be written, and in how few words a full story can be written. I wrote a series of short stories which I shared with Lucca and it made us realise it was time we worked together. It wasn’t clear at the beginning what that would become, and I don’t know if there was an explicit route into the film aspect of it.
LL: Jimmy and I had been meeting and talking, we tried to write a script together that was more practical long format. It didn’t really suit what we were doing – we were hitting a lot of walls, and Jimmy shared this exercise. He had started doing a few of them and said, “Why don’t we just do something with those fragments?” From then on, we started going back and forth with Jimmy writing them, sending them over and then rewriting them and writing new ones. With some of them, we immediately had a visual idea, but with others it was meeting and figuring out something that a visual element could aid.

JLS: Did you have more than ten at first?
JLF: I think I wrote 50. I don’t know exactly what made us choose the ones we did. I think it was partly to do with how easy a visual idea could be attached to them and how well they worked together. We didn’t plan that they would relate explicitly to each other because of the way we did it. There was this interesting forensic way of connecting them all, which I think is really nice.
LL: He would write a few and I’d say, “Send some more.” I’d come up with more visual ideas and then sometimes we would link and I’d be like, “Jimmy, I really liked this idea. I like this writing, the visuals are working.” It was trial and error. We didn’t want to make something that was completely standalone. If we’re putting it all together, we’re making a book, we wanted to have some sort of sense, at least in our minds, so it came from us putting things together.

“The most banal thing can create such a stir.”

JLS: Can you tell me more about the theme of absence and these fragments of moments?
JLF: One of the inspirations for the writing was Raymond Carver. I like the ephemeral style of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Each story is a kind of eventless window into someone’s life. Just looking at something very simple, and then it ends. I wanted that atmosphere, moments that don’t get enough attention, the kind of moments that we culturally think of as not capable of bearing meaning or being important. Transitional moments, the frayed edges of important moments. We wanted to see if we could structure them so that they became a story in themselves. We wanted to make something really earnest, that isn’t laden with the expectations we usually have of stories, and instead placing attention on people and things.
LL: Within that is us understanding what we’d experienced in our collaboration and the way we were talking about ideas and the underlying meanings of those stories. We would talk about moments, like someone walking down the road, that walk when you have a moment of reflection. It was that moment that could easily be passed through as absent of value and meaning, it’s more what’s inside the character and what’s inside us when we’re experiencing those things. It’s more of the way we felt things too, and the way that we saw things together, the way we talked about things. We would talk about sitting in a café and looking at someone and having that weird moment of intimacy with that person.

Fragments Segments Vestiges - Preview from Lucca Lutzky on Vimeo.

JLS: You have such a great cast: Rupert Everett, Sonny Hall, Susie Cave. How did you bring all of these people together?
LL: We prepared a document. We had the story, we had images and the idea of the place and how we were going to shoot it. Each individual, if it was going to be a one-take, if it was going to be three frames, we had everything meticulously in a nice little PDF. We’d sent it to people and hope they believed in the project. Same thing with Thurston [Moore]. Send it over and hope that we’re making some sort of sense and they thought we could make something interesting. Also chance, a friend of a friend, who can we message, let’s try this person. It was really just coming together as we went.

JLS: The score plays such an integral role in linking the stories. Thurston Moore created the music – did you have a say in the score?
LL: We talked about some recent work he had put out that we really resonated with and we said, “You’re Thurston Moore. Do what you think suits.” Then he took a while and sent us something. It just all made sense – we didn’t really tell him much. We told him which areas of his sound we enjoyed in the more experimental works he’s been making.
JLF: The last thing you want to do is direct Thurston Moore. [laughs]
LL: He understood the project immediately. The whole thing is like a guitar feedback and I think he understood the idea of it being absent, and within that, we mixed the sounds of the spaces and everything.

“We would talk about moments, like someone walking down the road, that walk when you have a moment of reflection.”

JLS: I’m sure each poem is special to you, but is there any in particular that surprised you when it came to life?
JLF: I think for me, Sonny’s [Hall]. He’s been in a couple of shorts, but I didn’t know how good of an actor he is until we filmed him, and his performance was among the best of the entire project. He was very nervous and wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to do it, because for him, the kind of direction was more meticulous because we wanted something a little bit specific. He completely jumped into the role exactly the way we were thinking, because he’s good at complex, precise feelings. There’s a scene of him putting on the headphones – every time I watch that with a group and he starts smiling, you just see everyone start smiling as well. There are other things I like, like the scene of the elderly lady removing her robe in the dressing room, which I think visually must be my favourite.
LL: One that will always resonate with me is the car scene because it was more of an experience with essentially no budget to pull it off. I think it was a surprise to everyone involved because it was quite an adrenaline-infused moment to be in that space and the two cars. Driving, going around shooting non-stop and trying do it in the safest way possible but risking a little bit. Also, the first scene with Pippa [Bennett-Warner] when she’s walking through the hospital, that scene had a specific feeling attached to the writing, and it was very difficult for us to understand the absence that we wanted to talk about in that moment. The writing really comes from more of a darker place than most of the others. We got that space one day before and when we walked into the room with her, the energy in that space was so encompassing of the poem and the way she performed. I felt I was able to translate the feeling that was brought to me when I read the piece Jimmy sent me, not necessarily what many people can get from that piece.

JLS: What do you hope people take from their experience of this installation?
JLF: We’re calling it a film installation. I think the idea behind that is that the environment or the situation in which we present it is important and somehow the experience of people being there and watching it is relevant.
LL: I hope that someone goes in there for however many minutes, in that environment where they’re essentially watching something that’s quite abstract and something is happening but it’s quite banal. I hope that they come out and maybe a week later, maybe a day later, they’re outside on the street and they catch a moment that’s so full of this magnetism, of nothingness, of emotion. I hope they can be like, “That’s another one of the fragments of our funny existence.” You know, the most banal thing can create such a stir. If someone can appreciate those moments and see them with beauty, and see the beauty behind them, this would be really nice.

Fragments, Segments, Vestiges will have a launch event on November 1st and will be open to public viewing on November 2nd from 10am to 6pm.