Sandra Lahire by Sarah Turner, Lis Rhodes and Sarah Pucill
Sandra Lahire, 19 November 1950 - 27 July 2001 in Memoriam You kept laughing So did you But it wasn’t funny Then why were you laughing? I was laughing ‘cos you were laughing But it wasn’t funny No, but you kept making me laugh Oh So why were you laughing? Because she looked like a Bridget Riley painting with egg on it You can see it now can’t you? A striped vertical monotone, subverted by a kind of yokey blob. Sandra Lahire and I had just come out of a meeting at the BFI. Before your imaginations run with this, let me be clear; I’m describing a jumper not a person. I can’t remember now if it was a policy or a production meeting as it’s Sandra’s irreverent humour that reverberates. A clear and haunting echo. And, as I write this I’m haunted not only by the loss of Sandra but by the loss of her laughter echoing through those spaces: I mean BFI Production in Rathbone Street, the London Film-Makers’ Co-op in Gloucester Avenue, Cinenova distribution (formerly Circles) and the Lux Centre, the monolith that formed through the merger of the LFMC and LEA. The haunting isn’t just for the fabric of those buildings, important though they were, as the loss that echoes in our current traumatised but atomised silence is the loss of collective practice; of thirty years of dissent and debate. For we didn’t, of course, just giggle in those meetings; we lobbied and discussed and produced collectively. Sandra was the only person who could have persuaded me to put maggots in my eyeballs. I performed in Lady Lazarus for her — then later that evening we’d stay up all night recording a soundtrack for one of my films. We’d go up to the LFMC to work on her optical printing and there we’d find Alia and Tanya Syed negotiating the Print Processor,
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then Lis Rhodes or Tina Keane would drop by to discuss all of our editing strategies. Sandra’s output was prodigious; her films are as exacting as her use of metaphor, and if her approach to form was irreverent her content was deadly serious. From her brilliant first film Arrows, a meditation on anorexia and cultural constructions of body image, through to her Plutonium films and the Sylvia Plath trilogy, Sandra’s vision as a filmmaker was as precise as a scalpel cutting down to bone. When Sandra died this summer from complications that arose from her long struggle with anorexia, I was forced to think again about anorexia and all the attendant cultural assumptions that it has. Many of these are so explicit in their negativity I won’t digress into listing them here because I still find myself thinking of something else. That “something else” is the work of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. For Lefebvre we are only truly “present” in what he calls extreme “moments”; individual or social crisis, the first flight of love or impending death. Call it crisis if you will, but Sandra lived that intensity in “moments” that spanned her work, her friendships, her loves. And in that, I’m sure of this: it wasn’t a death force, it was life affirming. Sarah Turner is a filmmaker and curator. She collaborated with Sandra on the Sylvia Plath trilogy. Sarah currently lectures in screenwriting at the Southampton Institute.
Sandra’s letters to Lis Rhodes July 26th 1990 Another chapter in the pulp novel? Have been to my sister’s these days, and getting a reception from her children which, considering my moods, I don’t deserve. But maybe because they are so raw they don’t see or remember these things, maybe being with them makes one pleasanter in the first place. I love the summer sunlight. It is very super 8 inducing. In fact today I will sell my original old Beatles record and get some super 8 in Camden. Smith College have sent me a welcoming letter, opening the Sylvia Plath collection for me and my camera. In fact
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