17 minute read
Curating “The Apparitional, films by Sandra Lahire and Barbara Hammer”
Notes by Selina Robertson, Ricardo Matos Cabo and So Mayer
Wherever I am and come from, my tongue is Lesbian. Sandra Lahire
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I am so aware of my body. Sandra Lahire in Arrows
The viewer enters the invisible, the place unseen yet familiar, his / her body. The “holy” body. The fragile body. The experimental body. I have returned to the interior body but through the exterior remains of the first cinefluorographic motion pictures of the human skeleton and organs. As we rush into the future it behoves us to look at our history. To stop, digest, inhale, read, and reflect. To appreciate and respect; to despair and vow never to repeat.
Barbara Hammer
The Apparitional was a film screening presented at Birkbeck Cinema on 18th May 2016. The event was held as part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2016, sponsored by Birkbeck Institute for Moving Image and Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture. This text is a record of the screening, a compilation of excerpts taken from introductions, emails and responses to the event.
Our idea for the screening was triggered by conversations with each other about how women’s psychic and social bodies, their illness and treatment have been represented in medical visual culture and in particular, in radical lesbian experimental cinema. We thought about the hidden histories of lesbian sexualities, and also about how ideas of (in)visibility are inscribed in the convergence and conflict between practices of science, objectivity, spectacle, gender, sexuality and technology. Sharing a mutual appreciation for Sandra Lahire’s and Barbara Hammer’s work, we spoke about how we might collaborate together to explore these issues through placing both filmmakers in dialogue with one another. Drawing on the concept of the The Apparitional from Terry Castle’s 1993 book The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture1 in which she locates the “ghosts” of lesbian sexualities obscured by history, together with the documentary work and experimental films of Barbara Hammer, Dr Watson’s X-Ray (1991) and Sanctus (1990), and Sandra Lahire’s Uranium Hex (1987) and Serpent River (1989), our screening explored this idea of the apparitional within the context of specific scientific and visual objectivity and the politics of gender and sexuality in the 1980s.
Excerpt of an email sent to Barbara Hammer, 11 February 2016.
Dear Barbara, [...]
In our discussions we have been thinking about the hidden history of lesbian sexualities, and also about how ideas of (in) visibility are inscribed in the convergence and conflict between practices of science, objectivity, spectacle, gender, sexuality and technology. Discussing the use of science in relation to this subject we thought it would be interesting to address the history of medical technology and specifically that of radiography and the use of X-rays. We are interested in using this idea of the ghost and the uncanniness implied by the concept of apparition (in the broad sense of the term) and how we can relate this with the body as a subject, sexuality, illness, radiation and exposure (as vulnerability). I told Selina how much I enjoyed your presentation of Sanctus at Tate and what you said about the work you did with the archives of Dr. Watson. You also mentioned the terrible ef-
1 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female
Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993).
fects suffered by the subjects of Watson’s images, exposed to early X-ray technology. I am aware there are several other dimensions to Dr. Watson’s work, notably his work as a translator of modernist texts and as a poet, as well as his work in ethnographic and avant-garde film, which led him to pursue his interest in industrial and medical research. A second screening would be dedicated to Sandra Lahire. As you may know, Lahire’s radiation trilogy draws on her lifelong passion to critically explore the porous relations between nature and culture, landscape(s) that are destroyed by pollution or nuclear waste and body and gender politics lensed through a radical lesbian vision. Lahire’s films deftly investigate arenas of in(visibility) and apparition as connected to the material, the social and the political. We should also not forget the lesbian erotic charge that pulsates through your films and Lahire’s trilogy. These films have recently come back into circulation, and significantly her remarkable body of work is little known outside of the 1st and 2nd generation of LFMC filmmakers, curators and writers. [...]
Another theoretical starting point for our screening was reading So Mayer’s chapter “Uncommon Sensuality: New Queer Feminist Film/Theory” in Feminisms, 2 where they posit the question whether the lesbian is still apparitional in cinema as a way of thinking about/with queer feminist experimental filmmakers and what they do to the screen to actively engage with theory on and off screen. The ghosts of the repressed come back in “small” or “poor” films, bringing together this idea of the apparitional with traces of film theory and radical lesbian experimental filmmaking to challenge representionality. In this way, we wanted to articulate ideas of the “apparitional” as a condition of visibility; and how the work of radical lesbian feminist filmmakers such as Hammer and Lahire might allow us to understand how some films engender their own politics through the prism of the apparitional.
We were aware that the work of Hammer and Lahire might not have been in conversation before. It was up to us to create the conditions for that conversation and in order to do so we had to make sure the films were presented in the best way possible. This meant not only sourcing the best prints available, but to trace the film materials back to their ori-
2 So Mayer, “Uncommon Sensuality: New Queer Feminist
Film/Theory” in Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers (eds.) Feminisms: Diversity, Difference, and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2015) pp. 86-96. gin — to trace the history of the prints and the different generations of video copies, to find out about the present state of prints, among other things. Due to difficulties and limitations of the Birkbeck Cinema we had to make important and sometimes difficult choices that would affect the way in which the films would be received. Working closely with projectionist Lori E. Allen, we kept the 16mm projection where possible and made sure reference was made when that was not possible.
When Selina worked as a film programmer at BFI Flare (formerly the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) in 2002-2005, she planned to organise a screening of Lahire’s work at the festival, but there was difficulty accessing the archive and film materials as it was so close to Lahire’s passing. Subsequently, the Nuclear trilogy was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in April 2007 as part of The Secret Public: The Days of the British Underground 19781988.
As film programmers, to have to wait to present Lahire’s films and critical writings has often felt like working in a space between the material and immaterial, where remembering, dreaming, desiring, hoping and mourning become survival acts of queer feminist film programming to counteract the erasure by omission in the heteronormative film canon. Moreover, this difficulty of access draws into sharp focus the ways in which the canon continues to be shaped by access to materials, rights, digital restoration, dominant concepts of political relevance, what counts as film heritage and the terms of distribution and exhibition.
The socio-political context for Sandra Lahire’s films in 1980s London
In 2001 Jacqueline Rose wrote Lahire’s obituary for The Guardian, “Making films, animating, bringing to life, was, as she said repeatedly in her commentaries on her own films and in her critical writings, a way to reassert the body in the face of erosion.” Lahire’s politics and creative practice was deeply connected to her own body and struggle with anorexia which took her life in 2001 at the age of 50. Her engagement with the limitations and abjections of her body can be seen in her film Arrows from 1984 which delivers a blistering address to Western patriarchal culture for its objectification and exploitation of the female body. As with her Nuclear trilogy, the female body and environmental body are one, of-
fering landscapes of reflection, illness, erosion, fear and attraction as well as aesthetic composition. “Wherever I am and come from, my tongue is Lesbian”3 she wrote from the Royal College of Art whilst a student in the Environmental Media department where her lecturers included Lis Rhodes. Drawing on Adrienne Rich,4 she envisaged resistance as a Lesbian continuum and a network for action in creative practice and political life. Watching these films today we bear witness to these lesbian apparitionalities and psychic hauntings within the raw bones of the film’s materiality.
Set in North Ontario, Lahire’s Nuclear films make visible the invisible menace of nuclear, industrialization, radioactivity and uranium mining or “yellow cake” as it is colloquially known. The people, women’s work and their bodies (both the miners and First Nations People), the environment and natural resources all bear the scars. The films should be historically and culturally contextualised within the decade that they were made, that of the charged landscape of 1980s Thatcherite Britain and the global militarisation of Cold War politics that saw the embodied activism of the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common, set up in 1981 by Women for Life on Earth, and in general with the feminist anti-nuclear movement of the decade and the politics of the Left. Moreover, the legislation in 1988 of the anti-gay law Section 28 opened up renewed direct queer activism around the HIV/AIDS pandemic and LGBTQ+ lives. Channel 4, which began transmission in 1982, commissioned radical lesbian, gay and Black cinema for television broadcast, specifically catering for less represented audiences. Serpent River was edited at the LFMC and Four Corners in Bethnal Green, for Channel 4 in 1989.
The previous decade saw filmmakers and collectives use their medium to participate in, as well as contribute to, radical politics. From mid-1960s to the mid-1990s the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), a ground-breaking organisation that was committed, as a political project, to generating, distributing and exhibiting artists’ moving image in Britain fostered a vibrant filmmaking community led by filmmakers whose initial aim was film production through an exploration of the structural and material properties of film; the LFMC eventually expanded to running workshops, hosting symposiums and weekly film programmes in the cinema. This environment, along with the gains of the Women’s Liberation Movement, supported Annabel Nicolson, Felicity Sparrow and Lis Rhodes among others to create a separate women only/feminist space at the LFMC and other spaces such as conferences and informal locations, creating an interconnected, supportive feminist art practice. The formation of COW (Cinema of Women) and Circles: Women’s Film and Video Distribution in the late 1970s-1980s came out of the LFMC and London’s interconnected feminist spaces.
This activist work opened creative and intellectual pathways for a second generation of LFMC women filmmakers such as Jean Matthee and Nina Danino to make work that challenged ideas around subjectivity, narrative, representation and sexuality. Lahire, Sarah Pucill, together with Sarah Turner, Ruth Novaczek and Alia Syed were filmmakers associated with the third generation of the LFMC, whose situated practice drew not only on feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism but also on beauty, music, colour, punk and Hollywood cinema, exploring the intertextual spaces between abstraction and narration. This was a counter-practice to change the world as Jean Matthee remembers, “The LFMC was a place that we fashioned as somewhere where women could go to explore, to experiment with complex difficulties, forces and contradictions. This was a time of the interregnum where the moment of the first generation of the LFMC filmmakers (the structural materialist) was over and the future neo-liberal project had not yet begun.”5
Both Uranium Hex and Serpent River were shot on 16mm, with the use of an optical printer, a “hands on” film practice that was key to both the practice of Hammer and Lahire at this time. Significantly, in a roundtable interview for MIRAJ, artist and filmmaker Nina Danino remembers how the women’s use of the optical printer at the LFMC “explored its possibilities but used structural techniques such as repetition, superimposition and other aesthetic effects … women working with representation and the subjective may also have created a context for developing men’s practices such as those of David Finch or Guy Sherwin. Women’s practice started to mould and change the kinds of representation this
3 Sandra Lahire, “Lesbians in Media Education” in Hilary
Robinson (ed.), Visibly Female: Feminism and Art Today: An
Anthology (New York: Universe Books, 1988), pp. 274-282. 4 Adrienne Rich, (1980) “Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence”. Signs 5 (4): pp. 631-600. 5 Nina Danino, Jean Matthee, Ruth Novaczek, Sarah Pucill and Alia Syed, (2015) “Roundtable discussion: The women of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op”. Moving Image Review and Art Journal 4 (1&2): pp. 164-179.
equipment could produce.”6 Indeed, this is a history about a shared form of feminist film practice linking aesthetics and technology that is only now coming to light.
From So Mayer’s response to the films of Sandra Lahire:
The Nuclear trilogy 1987-1989
In Tina Keane’s 12-screen video installation In Our Hands, Greenham (1984), it is Sandra Lahire’s hands that hold — technically, vignette — Keane’s footage from the Greenham Common women’s camp, including images of the famous New Year’s Day silo dance and a spider spinning its web. Perhaps conscious of holding Greenham in her hands, Lahire went on to make what could be considered a “post-Greenham” nuclear trilogy of Plutonium Blonde (1987), Uranium Hex (1987) and Serpent River (1989). These short films extend the feminist anti-nuclear experimental film movement (which included Lis Rhodes and Annabel Nicolson as well as Keane and Lahire) to connect Greenham activism to protests against a nuclear processing plant in the UK and a uranium mine in Northern Ontario, Canada, as well as critiquing images of “nuclear” women in mainstream films such as Silkwood (Mike Nichols, 1983). In her essay, “Singing for My Life: Memory, Nonviolence and the Songs of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp”, Greenham woman and activist historian Anna Reading notes that:
the ripples from Greenham were far more internationalized in the 1980s than [first] thought. These globalized connections were woven at the time as part of the nonviolent struggle well before digital connectivity. Feminists moved around the world, nurturing links between and with other related struggles, with the international peace movement connected through its various camps at different global sites.7
Lahire’s trilogy weaves a web across the international anti-nuclear movement, refusing the parochial that came to contain the British cinema of the 1980s, as her films imply instead how many fires were started in the traces and tracks of centuries of British imperialism. Serpent River is an hallucinatory study of a community and land eaten alive by uranium mining: an Anishinabe First Nation and signatory to the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850, Serpent River (whose members include film curator Jesse Wente) was in the throes of a 15-year process of clean-up from the Cutler Acid Plant when Lahire made her film, a clean-up that would continue to leach into Lake Huron.8
The films of the trilogy are a river system, linking there to here, an X-ray of the irradiation of colonial capitalism that finds, simultaneously, that the misogynist tropes of Eurowestern visual art persist in Hollywood’s nuclear mothers and martyrs, and that corporations continue colonisation on sacred land. Reading notes that the powerful myth of the Rainbow Serpent, who guards the underground uranium veins, came to Greenham via Australian First Nations anti-mining activists who visited the camp and hosted return visits. Lahire’s documentary is not just of one community in crisis, but that community and land as indicative and indexical of the global devastation of the nuclear industry. Her incisive vision takes the whole world into her hands, not as appropriation but to think responsibility, a web that still needs to be woven, and one that in Lahire’s hands is linked to an inclusive, anti-racist lesbian feminism.
There are rare echoes of it in two recent memory works: in the burning Lake Baikal in Sarah Turner’s Perestroika (2009), in Ginger’s refusal of both nuclear family and nuclear war in Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa (2012), both of which take up Lahire’s international feminist imaginary and weave it into feature-length narrative forms. As climate crisis intensifies and the nuclear threat returns, Lahire’s practice of holding and weaving remain crucial, critical inspirations from which feminist cinema can draw.
6 Michael Mazière and Nina Danino, (2014) “Roundtable discussion: London Film-makers’ Co-op – the second generation”. Moving Image Review and Art Journal 3 (2): pp. 236-247. 7 Anna Reading, “Singing for My Life: Memory,
Nonviolence, and the Songs of Greenham Common
Women’s Peace Camp” in Anna Reading and Tamar
Katriel (eds.) Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 147-165. 8 See http://serpentriverfn.com/meetup/our-history/
Uranium Hex, on set photograph with pen shading, Sandra Lahire, 1987.
Sanctus (1990) is best understood in the context of Barbara Hammer’s work in the 1980s and 1990s dealing with mortality, aging, illness and sexual mis- and under-representation as well as with the skeletal body, a motif that reappears in many of her works of this period. In her own words: “By the time I got to the 1990s and found the archive of Dr. Watson and his research associates, who X-rayed the body in motion, I was very aware of the fragile human body. Not only the unresolved issue of AIDS but also the environmental issues that threaten the body, and aging itself, of course. Today I’ve gone through cancer treatments and chemotherapy, which brings forth another invisibility of the body as it struggles to survive.” […]
James Sibley Watson, who had previously ventured into modernist poetry as well as filmmaking, including the experimental film Lot in Sodom (1933, co-directed with Melville Webber), also directed short industrial and amateur scientific films, for example about the physics of light (The Eyes of Science, 1930). From the 1940s until the 1960s, he returned to his interest in medicine, becoming a researcher in the radiology team of the University of Rochester School of Medicine, where he honed existing techniques for making cine-fluorographic films. These were short 20-second to one-minute animated X-rays using a lighting technique that produced a scintillating image when seen through a radiant screen. His team made thousands of such X-ray medical exams and also made films with no medical purpose, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of the moving 3D X-ray, including subjects, many times women, performing their daily routines, such as eating or putting on make-up. Barbara Hammer’s encounter with this archive happened in the late 1980s and played a fundamental role in the filmmaker’s work, influencing the way she approached archival footage. Hammer made sev-
eral works with material taken from this archive and revisited it throughout her career. She made Sanctus using images shot by Watson and his associates and directed a documentary about his Rochester archive, Dr. Watson’s X-rays (1991), a companion piece to Sanctus which we have also included in this programme. It is a short and raw research video documenting Hammer’s visit to the archive. She films the machines of Dr. Watson, shows us his cameras and optical printer, and does interviews with archivists, people, including his wife, who were close to Watson and scholars who have studied his work. […]
Hammer described the film as an “attempt to use a language of multiplicity to question the unitary concept of creation as well as the epistemology of the scientific method.” In Sanctus she re-figures images of X-rays by subjecting them to multiple passages through the optical printer, creating juxtapositions with various scientific and philosophical textual fragments within the image. Hammer uses mattes and hand-paints the images; she re-frames these X-rayed bodies, freezes and repeats their movements. This creates both fascination and horror. Her decision to mute the original soundtrack of the films (originally sounds of heartbeats or voices), replacing it with an electronic music collage, further disembodies these transparent skeletal bodies, turning them into ghosts without perceived interior or exterior. These images pulsate; just like apparitions, they materialise for brief instants in front of our eyes, only to disappear. […]
Lahire’s Trilogy was made around the same time as Sanctus, at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, in a period when the harm caused by the proliferation of nuclear energy plants and armaments was very much on the surface of public consciousness and protest. The films deal with spectrality and with the body under threat, exposed to radiation. By displaying processes of image and sound disfiguration and decomposition, Hammer and Lahire create an unstable territory where new sensibilities and unexpected image/sound configurations are able to emerge.
The apparitional mode is thus an unsettling, unfixed threshold between exterior and interior, between what is visible and what is not, what is recognised and who is able to recognize it. To engage with the apparitional in a queer context is to put fragility and instability at the heart of these images, discovering new ways of engaging with the politics of light and technology. Hammer and Lahire’s film practices confront these established politics, their bodies emerging in the light, thus entering a territory of multiplicity and uncertainty.
May 2016/January 2021
