On A Cold Draft

A Cold Draft

Sandra Lahire writes about Lis Rhodes’ new film

A Cold Draft (1988) shows the surveillance of a woman by overseers who have judged her to be mad.

What is most provocative about this film is that it proposes multiple credible viewpoints even as the woman is being certified insane by the “Censors” ... “it happens  —  here all the time.” She is many women who don’t officially exist, or make films about “desire” or “identity”, and who live in the streets without the cushions of career and therapy. We voyage into the skull of a woman and peer out to a monumentally static cold waste with planetary slow motion. The sun bleeds light. It is a bunker-eye view in that:

the execution had been planned, costed, and enacted the remains sold off to private investors.

And it is a kerb-side camera-eye. The gravel of the road is the grinding dogma that digests her into the maw of the system. In her own stomach, instead of food which she cannot buy, are charcoal grains. We peer through a window cut in a cranium of an extinct civilisation. I, we, live there now, but the controlling “Censors” would call that vision mad. Like the asphalt of the road, the pitch poured in to embalm this particular mummy made her a dispensable tool of the social pyramid and its oneway road  —  up. The road from Chernobyl (“sealed in a sheep’s intestine”) is eroded by radioactive transporters in a play she has no part in  —  with heroes at the top and squalor beneath. You are either slaving for this great event, or you sit like a flexed corpse in your alloted space. But, says this film, the many voices down here are also a great root in the undergrowth, a seed with a code that evolves through time in the visual planes.

Aleatory shifts between stills create a stately radiating pulse at their roots of fusion. These movements are perfectly reversible. This structure eliminates drama. Like a transparent sepulchre, the visual planes dissolve so slowly into each other that they stretch tick tock time. Systems of incarceration fix, divide, record the capture and control of our bodies. The film counters this by dissolving, multiplying and overlapping the methods of walling us up. The jittery flicker of TV feels mean by comparison. And it took chunks of a woman’s eyesight in the factory to make a TV set: that never sees her presence or perceives her absence.

We hear the women’s voices sussing the System. They stimulate action as did St Joan’s, for which she was executed. They are not pleas to the patriarchy or the art patrons. A Cold Draft sweeps away the comfortable view of a woman’s place being a cosy beauty to which men can turn from the cruelty of the business and military world. She lays bare the raping of a woman’s energy and time. Surrounded by age upon age of dust and bombed-out bone  —  splinters from the wasted city, that grow large as hoardings on the screen, she is an embrace of many women, but also one who is utterly isolated. Daylight fades in and dies out regularly: across her face, and over a vast overpopulated, infertile land for the Reactor. This monolith poses as a god around whom we may creep at ground level.

That is, when we are not doing the clone-multiple jerks of work:

actions frozen into repeatable parts hammered home in freezer bags

Order is maintained with Nazi Rationality; with abstract double-talk of freedom at the end... arbeit macht frei. But the “liberal” state has overlooked the sting in the tail of its slaves. Yes, the road “edged with rape” has as its fast lane, men’s brutal competitive market forces zooming along. But, even as the macho stealth bombers and surveillance copters crescendo in and out of our heads, the certified insane woman conjures up her own sensuous and luscious world. The Controllers are the ones who are pushing over the limits of intelligibility, with their obsolete warnings about radiation (nowhere to hide) and their flogging of contaminated food. Mutation means madness. The microchip and rubber plant officescape that she must dust is part of a military technology, like the everexpanding Siemens Electronics in a new “free” Germany. She examines her nail-parings under a lens to the deathrattle of the State overhead. Her voice to her woman friend hits metal sheets, but we hear her laugh defiantly at “the choice of bracelet or manacle.” The meaning

of the metal-insect sound somersaults, and instead we hear women in gaol rattling mugs on the bars.

From out of the film the storyteller’s rich voice surrounds the viewer, making the poem into an oscilloscope  —  drawing response to the startling and convulsive images:

she watched the emerald sun roll around the world    a bullet on a saucepan lid

She has her conversation with an absent friend. And thereby marks passing events in the time shared with the viewer. This is closer to the bone and to our rhythms than screwup-able news-headline poetry, or controlled doses of TV. Fragments of working women’s lives telescope into each other. We see through the windows of their busrides, to each of the women silhouetted against the panes of old buildings. The execution was a denial of herself. Yet her own emotional reality can melt down this repression:

she kissed her — and said reality is imposed to be believed

All this she sees and feels, but the camera surveilled only a mask-like face as it:

snapped at the light ignoring the snake in her eyes

By day she is under the deathly multiple-fly-eye of the sun: traditionally known as the light of reason. Insects in this film are the survivors. And there is a lurid place for the sun to sit. “Three kinds of colour  —  black, yellow and scarlet  —  loomed ominously over the people” (words of a Nagasaki survivor). Lis’ film-pictures are expressive like camp survivors’ work, sometimes feeling like woodcuts. A Cold Draft opens out in a rhythm of revelations rather than the forced formulae of the male structuralist tradition. Neither is this an example of “denials” in materialist filmmaking. The woman in the film who was censored  —  declared insane  —  has nothing to deny. Rather, it was the Controllers who issued the edicts of denials  —  in, say,... “There will be no”  —  food, water, survivors. (Civil Defence). The nuclear winter which is being manufactured will be a world of darkness, cold, powerful storms, ferocious glows of chemical intensity, and cockroaches.

The woman’s voice is not fearful from a shelter. It has kept a memory of sensuousness in the colours: yes — I loved her in between the purple and green of violets and lavender are passion to me

A Cold Draft cuts through the established Culture’s convenient orders and labels with a razor. The woman no longer tries to paper over the cracks in the language ossified. Instead, if such a cracked monolith constitutes reality, madness is as plausible as sanity. The film is no mere re-enactment of a pathological state, with the old cliché of woman going mad (oooh look how hysteria can jazz up the visuals). In the currently imposed “reality”, large numbers on the stock market, multiples of radioactive units, half-lives in centuries  —  all belong to the same meaningless large numbers that stand for the hunger and liquidation of people. And the coin currency liquidates into credit cards for the few, in a system which has the impartial frenzy of a steamhammer. Would the woman’s perception of exploitation even be heard against the official “freedom” from Communism? The holocausts of commercial cinema teeter on the trivial, and belittle those who actually died (and who will die from being guinea pigs for “tests”).

In A Cold Draft there is a move away from manipulation of our emotions towards a laconic accumulation of details. Against the system of the “Censors” the storyteller proposes many peripherals: the young woman in a bar maybe lesbian; the woman now utterly alone in crumbling accommodation; and the woman in the factory:

she had made their profit next she must make her living a fury of sweat ran down her arms

I hear an echo or forewarning of a stage early in the 1930s when some Jewish people were forced to clean the road with toothbrushes. This brutalisation paved the way to terminal concentration camps.

Originally published in Undercut, no. 19, Autumn 1990.