Sandra Lahire

by Jo Comino

An exhaustive line of enquiry runs through Sandra Lahire’s films. Sparked off by personal preoccupations, they comprise a barrage of facts and statistics, images and sounds, loosely interwoven around a specific topic and branching off into wider issues. The earlier work, low-key and unofficial in its tools  —  16mm and Super 8 film, some camcorder footage and Walkman sound  —  flouts so-called documentary objectivity. Arrows (1984), a disturbing treatise on anorexia, sets self-portraits against pecking, bird-like images while a confessional voice-over shifts discussion into the field of cultural representation. Four stays in Elliot Lake in North Ontario, Canada, where the multi-national Rio Tinto Zinc owns a huge uranium mining operation, instigated the films Uranium Hex (1987, a pilot), Plutonium Blonde (1987) and Serpent River (1989).

Serpent River is the most rigorously organised, both in the formal progression from ice and snow imagery to fire and brimstone and back again, and rhetorically, as an investigation into a latter-day body politic. Taking a multi-layered approach, it centres on medical, political and social issues, with the river as (contaminated) life-blood of the community. Testimonies and interviews (the staple of traditional documentary) are linked with performance which, featuring the filmmaker herself, anchor the content of the film, inscribing it as personally perilous. The film is further removed from conventional investigative reporting by the way in which both sound (synthesised Geiger counter noises) and image (slow-motion, freeze-framing, repetition, solarisation and flicker effects) are extensively reworked.

Lahire’s integration of sound, image and intent is often apposite; there are flashes of inspiration in the way, for example, the view of a bared back, with muscles painfully flexing under the skin, is succeeded by shots of drills pounding away at the rock face. Her manipulation of colour is excellent, conjuring up sulphurous yellows to match the description of yellow cake residues or, in Uranium Hex, causing a field of flowers to flare up like a Warhol screen-print. Occasionally the parallels, more often when stated as opposed to drawn, can seem over-laden; the way in which, for instance, the notion of vulnerability fixes on a group of schoolchildren.

In Lady Lazarus (1991) which introduces itself in the opening titles as “a film spoken by Sylvia Plath, 27th October 1932  —  11th February 1963,” the biographical structure, with its insistence on cinematic pilgrimage, has its limits. A woman (Sarah Turner, a filmmaker herself) is captured on film responding to the Plath recordings, standing in for her in a sense, on the image track. While this can be interpreted by the viewer as period re-enactment, the narrative thread gives context and continuity to Lahire’s visual similes for the obsessive rhyming patterns of the poems.

The one minute long Eerie (1992), commissioned by the Arts Council and BBC2’s The Late Show, is of necessity, much tighter and more muted. It draws visual and aural analogies between the act of film projection and the operation of a cable-car carrying the loved object, framing her, much as the rectangle of the screen does. These few shots, intercut with a romantic interlude  —  an encounter, a dance, a kiss  —  are evocative but also focus our attention on the process of image-making, on the nature of cultural representation (crucially, as a lesbian film) and the potential for appropriating, as Lahire does, such images.

Written for A Directory of British Film & Video Artists, edited by David Curtis and published by the Arts Council of England in 1996.