Introduction by María Palacios Cruz
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This modest volume represents the first monographic publication to be dedicated to the work of British filmmaker Sandra Lahire (1950-2001). Lahire was a central member of the feminist and experimental filmmaking community in London in the 1980s and 1990s. She made ten 16mm films, most of them under half an hour in length. Hers is an important body of work that deserves wider recognition — its environmental concerns, its intersectional feminism, its honest discussion of mental health feel poignantly modern and relevant today. Marked by corporeal vulnerability — her own, that of the female body, the body of the earth, the body of film — Lahire’s work proposes a comparison between the violence committed by patriarchal society against women and that committed by humans against the non-human world. Her four anti-nuclear films echo the feminist anti-nuclear, anti-war movement at the time. Formally, they merge documentary, performance, animation, experimentation (superimposition — both in camera and on the optical printer — re-filming, colourisation, changes of speed, layering of sounds). “Kaleidoscopic” is a word that many texts use to describe her work. Lesbian, Jewish, feminist, Lahire was a proud queer activist in a troubled time of British history, Thatcher’s 1980s. In her essay “Lesbians in Media Education”, written as a student at the Royal College of Art, she discusses oppression and identity: “Wherever I am and come from, my tongue is Lesbian.” Her work — her films, her words — is of the present, her present, but it reaches both to the past and to the contemporary moment. From her first to her last films, Lahire was in sustained dialogue with the poetry and archive of Sylvia Plath.
Living on air
