Introduction

by María Palacios Cruz

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.

The connection between biography and artistic work is a difficult one to untangle in Lahire’s filmmaking. The films are also ground-breaking in the frank way that they addressed the unspoken cultural causes of diseases such as anorexia, with which she struggled throughout her life and which led to her untimely passing in 2001.

Like Sylvia Plath’s, hers is a body of work that is retrospectively overshadowed by her premature death aged 50. The trauma of her loss, still painful to many, perhaps contributed towards a lack of visibility of her work until recent years. The texts included here offer a much richer account of her biography and artistic work than that which can be attempted in this brief introduction. She was, as Maud Jacquin writes, “one of Britain’s boldest and most important experimental feminist and queer filmmakers.”

This cahier brings together new and existing texts on Lahire as well as writing by Lahire herself, from letters to newspapers to essays on subjects close to her practice: Lesbian filmmaking, Sylvia Plath, the work of important figures such as mentor and friend Lis Rhodes or her partner Sarah Pucill. We have also been able to include a number of documents from LUX and Cinenova, as well as from Sarah Turner’s personal collection, that hint to Lahire’s creative process; storyboards and excerpts from proposals, including detailed planning for her unfinished project Necropolis. The archive of Sandra Lahire, a prolific letter writer, exists across fragmented personal and institutional collections.

It was important for us to address her life and work from the perspective of the living  —  through her own writing, her collages, through texts by her contemporaries, whilst at the same time being able to look back on it from the standpoint that a twenty-year gaps affords, to contemplate the significance of her ten films as an entire body of work. Newly commissioned texts by Laura Guy, Sarah Pucill and Ana Vaz, as well as recent writing by Maud Jacquin, Vicky Smith, Irene Revell and Kerstin Schroedinger, Selina Robertson and Ricardo Matos Cabo (in complicity with So Mayer) situate Lahire’s legacy in the present moment.

This is not an exhaustive anthology  —  an important text such as Marina Grzinic extended essay for luxonline has not been included because it is easily accessible.1 Others could not be included because archival research was impacted by the closures of libraries during lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Initial bibliographical work was conducted by the research group Their Past is Always Present at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola,2 who have collaborated with Courtisane on this publication.

It is in the texts of her contemporaries that Sandra Lahire comes alive as a person. Sarah Turner’s moving account of Lahire’s laughter “echoing” through the spaces of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative and Circles, gives a sense both of the vivacity of her presence and of a close-knit community in which she was a vital force. We have included film credits in the filmography to account for the importance of her many collaborators. She also contributed to works by others: piano music for Lis Rhodes, camerawork for Tina Keane … It is Lahire’s hands that are seen in Keane’s In Our Hands, Greenham (1984). We thank all the authors for permission to reproduce their texts in this volume. We are particularly grateful to both Sarah Pucill and Sarah Turner for their support.

1 https://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/sandra_lahire/ essay(1).html 2 Charlotte Procter and I are co-lead investigators for this research project. Three films by Sandra Lahire (Plutonium

Blonde, Night Dances and Johnny Panic) have also been digitally restored in the context of Their Past is Always Present.