Echoer by Laura Guy
Sandra Lahire was an extraordinary reader of Sylvia Plath. Many of her films contain lines from Plath’s poetry and prose, utilising recordings of the poet reading her writing aloud. These sound fragments echo through the films, framing Lahire’s own film language. This is especially true of the Living on Air trilogy — Lady Lazarus (1991), Night Dances (1995) and Johnny Panic (2000) — which represents a profound engagement with Plath over a ten-year period, each film a sustained encounter with the poet and her work. Lahire described these encounters with Plath as collaborations, indicating the depth of the relationship she sought and emphasising the way that the text continues to lead an active life after its author is no longer with us. “Plath’s poetics could be used to inform filmic perspectives such as the microcosm of the frame and the spaces it implies outside its boundary,” Lahire wrote in 1999, “her voice is a sound miniature, framing the ‘moth-breath’ of her baby wakening her ears to the ‘far sea’.” The voice of the poet has an echo-like effect that awakens film to shifting scales and intensities, confusing the distinct locations that separate the spoken from the heard, the self from other. The Living on Air trilogy is not only a collaboration with Plath but also with other women. Night Dances (1995), the second in the Plath trilogy is dedicated to Lahire’s mother, Inge Madsen, with who she worked on a number of her films. In the film, her mother’s hands, arched and pale, glide across the frame, playing a stone piano that they came across in a graveyard. In Night Dances, dedication to mother is the establishing shot but she is surrounded by others who dance through the film. Cécile Chich and Fran Jacobson hold each another in tight embrace. Sarah Turner plays ferrywoman with Charlotte Schepke on the deck beside her. Many of these women are filmmakers too, part of a feminist network working in London. Studying first with Tina Keane at St. Martin’s School of Art and then with Lis Rhodes at the RCA, Lahire became involved in independent spaces like the
London Film-Makers’ Co-op.1 The affinities between women filmmakers associated with these and other institutions in this period encompass working partnerships, friendships and romantic attachments. Such relationships are legible in Lahire’s films and the credits that accompany them. This community was integral to the production of feminist experimental film in Britain at this time and has been crucial for maintaining Lahire’s legacy after her death in 2001. The examination of feminized labour in relation to biological and social reproduction, and medical and military intervention, that one finds in Lahire’s films, influenced, Marina Grzinic writes, “deeply not only a generation of feminists, but also the lesbian movement in Britain and internationally.”2 Like many feminist filmmakers of this generation, Lahire’s work often departed from autobiography. The stakes of speaking from experience — in particular of lesbian and Jewish identity and of anorexia — are high, exposing a deep interior or private location where broader structural oppression is felt and from where wider analysis is drawn. As So Mayer and Selina Robertson write of imagery of a feeding tube in Edge (1986), it is “a memory of Lahire’s embodied experience of hospitalization perhaps, as well as an image that
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Living on air
So Mayer and Selina Robertson discuss this in their review of Maud Jacquin’s programme “From Reel to Real: Women, Feminism and the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative” at Tate Modern in September 2016. Jacquin also provides a short overview in her essay on Lahire, reproduced in this dossier. See So Mayer and Selina Robertson, ‘‘‘Joined together there is power, sister’: Re-viewing feminist work from the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative”, in Aniki: Revista Portugesa da Image mem Movimento, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2017, pp. 222-229; Maud Jacquin, “‘Overexposed, like an X-ray’: The Politics of Corporeal Vulnerability in Sandra Lahire’s Experimental Cinema”, in Lucy Reynolds (ed), Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Contexts and Practices, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 127-138. Marina Grzinic, “Sandra Lahire” on luxonline. [Accessed online at: https://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/sandra_ lahire/essay(1).html on 16 January 2021]
