Echoer

by Laura Guy

Sandra Lahire was an extraordinary reader of Sylvia Plath. Many of her films contain lines from Plath’s poetry and prose, utilising recordings of the poet reading her writing aloud. These sound fragments echo through the films, framing Lahire’s own film language. This is especially true of the Living on Air trilogy  —  Lady Lazarus (1991), Night Dances (1995) and Johnny Panic (2000)  —  which represents a profound engagement with Plath over a ten-year period, each film a sustained encounter with the poet and her work. Lahire described these encounters with Plath as collaborations, indicating the depth of the relationship she sought and emphasising the way that the text continues to lead an active life after its author is no longer with us. “Plath’s poetics could be used to inform filmic perspectives such as the microcosm of the frame and the spaces it implies outside its boundary,” Lahire wrote in 1999, “her voice is a sound miniature, framing the ‘moth-breath’ of her baby wakening her ears to the ‘far sea’.” The voice of the poet has an echo-like effect that awakens film to shifting scales and intensities, confusing the distinct locations that separate the spoken from the heard, the self from other.

The Living on Air trilogy is not only a collaboration with Plath but also with other women. Night Dances (1995), the second in the Plath trilogy is dedicated to Lahire’s mother, Inge Madsen, with who she worked on a number of her films. In the film, her mother’s hands, arched and pale, glide across the frame, playing a stone piano that they came across in a graveyard. In Night Dances, dedication to mother is the establishing shot but she is surrounded by others who dance through the film. Cécile Chich and Fran Jacobson hold each another in tight embrace. Sarah Turner plays ferrywoman with Charlotte Schepke on the deck beside her. Many of these women are filmmakers too, part of a feminist network working in London. Studying first with Tina Keane at St. Martin’s School of Art and then with Lis Rhodes at the RCA, Lahire became involved in independent spaces like the London Film-Makers’ Co-op.1 The affinities between women filmmakers associated with these and other institutions in this period encompass working partnerships, friendships and romantic attachments. Such relationships are legible in Lahire’s films and the credits that accompany them. This community was integral to the production of feminist experimental film in Britain at this time and has been crucial for maintaining Lahire’s legacy after her death in 2001.

The examination of feminized labour in relation to biological and social reproduction, and medical and military intervention, that one finds in Lahire’s films, influenced, Marina Grzinic writes, “deeply not only a generation of feminists, but also the lesbian movement in Britain and internationally.”2 Like many feminist filmmakers of this generation, Lahire’s work often departed from autobiography. The stakes of speaking from experience  —  in particular of lesbian and Jewish identity and of anorexia  —  are high, exposing a deep interior or private location where broader structural oppression is felt and from where wider analysis is drawn. As So Mayer and Selina Robertson write of imagery of a feeding tube in Edge (1986), it is “a memory of Lahire’s embodied experience of hospitalization perhaps, as well as an image that

1 So Mayer and Selina Robertson discuss this in their review of Maud Jacquin’s programme “From Reel to

Real: Women, Feminism and the London Film-Makers’

Co-operative” at Tate Modern in September 2016. Jacquin also provides a short overview in her essay on Lahire, reproduced in this dossier. See So Mayer and Selina

Robertson, ‘‘‘Joined together there is power, sister’:

Re-viewing feminist work from the London Film-Makers’

Co-operative”, in Aniki: Revista Portugesa da Image mem

Movimento, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2017, pp. 222-229; Maud Jacquin,

“‘Overexposed, like an X-ray’: The Politics of Corporeal

Vulnerability in Sandra Lahire’s Experimental Cinema”, in Lucy Reynolds (ed), Women Artists, Feminism and the

Moving Image: Contexts and Practices, London and New

York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 127-138. 2 Marina Grzinic, “Sandra Lahire” on luxonline. [Accessed online at: https://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/sandra_ lahire/essay(1).html on 16 January 2021]

holds a collective haptic memory of women’s bodies as sites of torture, abjection and heteronormative patriarchal entrapment.”3 Plath is a guide for this inquiry and her poetry is a line that connects Lahire’s earliest films to her last. Arrows (1984) features extracts from Plath’s poem “The Thin People” alongside the voices of Lahire and other women who recount experiences of anorexia. “Lines from Sylvia Plath” are also woven through Edge, a frenetic film of shifting scales propelled by the quickened rhythm of a foetal heart. “This is the city where men are mended,” it begins. Cut open by knife or fragmented through media circuits, scrutiny of the body in Edge produces a kind of invasive aesthetics that foreshadows Johnny Panic, Lahire’s final film, based on Plath’s story of the same name, in which the self is split before the surgeon’s gaze.

Lahire’s films are not simply illustrations of Plath’s poetics. The poet’s singular voice punctuates their soundtracks as the poems are recomposed within meticulous arrangements of other image and sound elements. Yet the films share with the poetry various repeated themes and forms. One encounters feminine whispers, vivid colours, the hot hues of flowers that are too red, like wounds. The body is shorn of flesh, all bone, yet never ossified, instead a spectral presence of the feminine that is unfixed, unstable. In Lahire’s films, as with Plath’s poetry, one finds permutations of the feminine as it has been violently organised through  —  but crucially also as it exceeds  —  the tools and technologies of capitalist patriarchy. What does it mean to speak from this place of the feminine, an unruly force, an abject object of fantasies of patriarchal control? It is an act of resistance but, or even because, occupying it is also unbearable. The feminine, literally, too much to bear. Perhaps this is why Lahire felt it a subject suited to the scale of poetry, a form that Plath describes as “a tyrannical discipline, you’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you’ve just got to burn away all the peripherals.”4

Of all her work, the Living on Air trilogy represents Lahire’s most sustained encounter with the poet, exhibiting what the filmmaker’s partner, the artist Sarah Pucill refers to as a “‘lived’ understanding of Plath’s texts.”5 Pucill’s idea of a lived reading of a text invokes citation as an embodied practice, and resonates as much with Pucill’s approach to filmmaking as it does Lahire’s. In Lahire’s Lady Lazarus, the protagonist, played by Sarah Turner, makes contact with Plath through a Ouija, or “talking”, board. The film imagery occupies the psychic landscape of Plath’s poetry  —  a bell jar, a carousel, undulating waves  —  as well as physical sites that Plath inhabited during her life. The film visits the grave of Plath’s father, a dilapidated childhood home, and Smith College, the poet’s alma mater. Drawn into Plath’s orbit, the protagonist engages in the temporal anachronisms of camp as she chooses outmoded fashions from outdated magazines and drives a 1950s-style vintage car. As the séance progresses, the film enters the internal structure of a building. “One year in every ten I manage it,” Plath’s voice reads, in a line from the eponymous poem that continues:

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

Coins are placed on the eyes of our Plathian reader, a pre-emptive payment to Charon. Here, as in the other two films in the Living on Air trilogy, to live in Plath’s work is to inhabit the poet’s proximity to death.

As Plath speaks through the body of the films one wonders whether, like the protagonist acting as a conduit for the poet in Lady Lazarus, the lines could as well be spoken by Lahire. This convergence between filmmaker and poet is not straightforward, however, given the complexity with which Lahire imbued identification as a psychic category, one intimately connected to her understanding of lesbian desire. In her essay “Lesbians in Media Education”, written while she was still a student at the Royal College of Art, Lahire transcribes and compiles interviews with women artists who she has asked to reflect on their experience in formal education settings.6 These statements are rendered as a series of paragraphs at the beginning of the piece. Following from one to the next without being attributed to any author, the words

3 Mayer and Robertson, p. 224. 4 Sylvia Plath interviewed by Peter Orr in The Poet Speaks:

Interviews with Contemporary Poets, London: Routledge, 1966. [Accessed at https://www.modernamericanpoetry. org/content/1962-sylvia-plath-interview-peter-orr on 16

January 2001]. This line features in the soundtrack of

Lady Lazarus. 5 Sarah Pucill, “Sandra Lahire: Lady Lazarus and Johnny

Panic”, Vertigo Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2002 [Accessed online at https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/ volume-2-issue-2-spring-2002/sandra-lahire1/ on 16

January 2021] 6 Sandra Lahire, “Lesbians in Media Education”, in Hilary

Robinson (ed.), Visibly Female: Feminism and Art Today,

London: Camden Press, 1987.

of various individuals become a single voice that gives testimony to the experience of lesbian identity. Yet, by speaking as one, the text embodies difference too and articulates intersecting experiences of oppression, for example of Black lesbians, Jewish lesbians and lesbian mothers. The device employed in “Lesbians in Media Education” is a feminist reworking of the Marxist resistance to fragmentation and reflects the influence of Rhodes, who experimented with multiple voices in her own writing at this time.7 Through the conceit, Lahire conjures a lesbian continuum, Adrienne Rich’s idea of the “range through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experiences.”8 For the filmmaker this “lesbian lens” is a “women’s circle of discourse,”9 invoking the name, Circles, of the feminist film and video distributor that Rhodes founded with Jo Davis, Felicity Sparrow and Annabel Nicolson, and which Lahire was involved with in the 1980s. (Reading the text now, it also calls to mind Sarah Turner’s moving description of Lahire’s “laughter echoing through those spaces” such as Circles and the London Film-Makers’ Co-op.10)

Countering the fetishization of the female body in visual media by “turning negation back on itself,”11 the essay goes on to theorise a method of filmmaking that “[builds] up a dialogue with aspects of herself, with doubles or twins or alter-egos, as Sylvia Plath does by her writing of The Bell Jar.”12 Lahire illustrates this idea with reference to Jeanette Iljon’s Focii (1974), a film in which identification and desire is blurred as a woman separates from, and has an erotic encounter with, her reflection. “Now we are thinking of two women imaging together,” Lahire writes, “lips speaking together, maybe in conflict but so making a discourse in and of and for itself, not embedded in one certain psychoanalytic schema of construction of femininity.”13 With the exception of Arrows, the way that Lahire works with multiple voices in “Lesbians in Media Education” to strengthen “the network

7 See Lis Rhodes and María Palacios Cruz (ed), Telling Invents

Told, London: The Visible Press, 2019. 8 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian

Existence”, Signs, Vol. 5, No. 3, Summer 1980, p. 648. 9 Sandra Lahire, “Lesbians in Media Education”, p. 276. 10 Sarah Turner, “Sandra Lahire 19 November 1950  —  27 July 2001 in Memoriam”, Vertigo Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2002 [Accessed online at https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/ vertigo_magazine/volume-2-issue-2-spring-2002/sandralahire1/ on 16 January 2021] 11 Sandra Lahire, “Lesbians in Media Education”, p. 275. 12 Sandra Lahire, “Lesbians in Media Education”, p. 277. 13 Sandra Lahire, “Lesbians in Media Education”, p. 276. through which we will bring about material changes” is different to the way that she works with sound fragments, especially Plath’s voice, in her films.14 In the essay one finds, with recourse to lesbian desire, ways of understanding identification that disturb distinctions between self and other.15 Referencing Plath in order to do this, Lahire’s early attempt at theorising the dynamics of internal and collective voice illuminates the way that the poet enters her later works.

In “Lesbians in Media Education”, various accounts of personal experience are interwoven within the text. In her work with moving image, voice is a material that is woven into the fabric of the film. Plath, who composed her later poems to be read out loud, speaks her writing that happened, as Jacqueline Rose writes, “along the edge of language where words fill with an orality they have only partly subsumed.”16 For the Living on Air trilogy, Lahire worked mostly from recordings of Plath reading her poetry at the British Council on 30 October 1962. Lahire was given permission to use these recordings by Olwyn Hughes, sister of Ted Hughes and accessed them through the National Sound Archive. As well as poetry, the recordings feature an interview between the poet and Peter Orr, the head of the British Council’s recorded sound department at the time. Plath tells Orr how, unlike doctors or midwives or lawyers, who she suggests are engaged in “an area of practical experience,” a poet “lives a bit on air.” And yet, of poetry, she says, “I don’t think I could

14 Sandra Lahire, “Lesbians in Media Education”, p. 281. 15 This is pertinent to the series of photographs by Sarah

Pucill through which I first encountered Lahire as a student, almost fifteen years ago now. The portraits show the two artists within a series of overlapping gazes, facilitated by mirrors and frames. The images counterpose likeness of features or physicality with formal devices that work to defamiliarise and abstract. Pucill restages these photographs in Stages of Mourning (2004), a film that meditates on the loss of her lover and creative partner and which conveys both the irresistibility and strangeness of images. There are the ways we live in images. There are the ways we live in images with/as others. “I have been interested in how the lesbian gaze disrupts traditional psychoanalytic theories that cannot accommodate the simultaneity of identification and desire,” writes Pucill of the series, suggesting that this gaze allows the subject to be

“in two places at the same time.” Here is the lesbian gaze as echo, an idea that demands more time than I am able to give it in this essay. See Sarah Pucill in Kate Newton and

Christine Rolph (eds.) Masquerade: Women’s Contemporary

Portrait Photography, Cardiff: Ffotogallery, 2003, p. 102. 16 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 34.

live without it. It’s like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me.” Excerpts of this interview feature in Lady Lazarus. For that film, Lahire also worked with magnetic tapes of Plath recorded at Stephen Fassett’s studio on 13 June 1958 and on 22 February 1959. 17 These were some of the earliest tapes that Plath made (another was for the poet Lee Anderson in April 1958) and include the poems “Ouija” and “Point Shirley”, lines of which appear in Lahire’s film. Pucill describes how Lahire worked with the tapes, laid down on the tracks of a flatbed editor so that the sound was compiled in much the same way as the image, from sequences of fragments spliced together.

In the psychoanalytic sense, Lahire’s use of the recordings of Plath deepens the relationship that all language bears to orality. As Rose writes in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), “in her commentary on the process of writing, Plath constantly underscores this physicality of language… At one crude or basic level, not to be able to write is to be physically sick. No less basic (no less crude), language and orality run back into each other, their connection made literal  —  writing as biting, sucking, vampire-like on the substance of life.”18 This is poignant for a filmmaker who undertook a profound examination of anorexia in her films. It is also significant for a poet whose work is too often dogged by biography. In an article dedicated to Lahire, Rose, who was her doctoral supervisor at the time of her death, discusses a line in The Haunting that distinguishes her book on Plath from a biography.19 Rose explains that she made this distinction because Plath’s estate disputed elements of her analysis. Yet the caveat is not meant as a means to avoid retribution. In stating that her own book is not a biography, Rose asserts the difference between a life and the work, a difference that the estate’s unease fails to acknowledge. Biography, Rose argues, functions in the opposite direction to fiction or poetry, in which life becomes a point of departure rather than an intended destination. In the relationship that Plath’s work bears to life, one understands that writing floods a space of feeling where speech often fails. With reference to Plath’s poem “Daddy”, Rose shows how the poet has “taken an act of rage and turned it into a moment of recognition.”20 Inhabiting Plath’s poetry as an echo, where the voice sounds simultaneously from the speaker and from elsewhere, Lahire occupies this same gap in intelligibility. In Lahire’s films, Plath’s words are lit up by fireworks, are bathed in flames, or are flooded with water. They represent an extraordinary reading of Plath that the narrative trap of biography can’t manage. If this is the function of poetry, as Rose suggests, Lahire infuses experimental film with the same promise.

February 2021

p. 56 Lady Lazarus, props list from proposal, Sandra Lahire, 1991. Courtesy of Sarah Turner. p. 57 Lady Lazarus, description of visuals from proposal, Sandra Lahire, 1991. Courtesy of Sarah Turner.

17 These recordings were produced as part of a collaboration between Fassett’s studio and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University, where Lahire accessed the tapes.

Christina Davis, Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, provides a useful account of the collaboration in “‘Archive of the Mouth’: Tracing Baez, Plath, Sun Ra, Sexton, et al back to a single pivotal recording studio” [Accessed online at: http://woodberrypoetryroom.com/?p=3044 on 16

January 2021]. 18 The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, p. 31. 19 Jacqueline Rose, “This is not a biography”, London Review of Books, Vol. 24, No. 16, August 2002. [Accessed online at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n16/jacquelinerose/this-is-not-a-biography on 16 January 2021]. 20 “This is not a biography” [online]