Eruption, rupture, suture and disruption

by Sarah Pucill

In a video of Sandra talking to camera which she asked me to record in my flat, she discussed some ideas she wanted to explore for her PhD,1 her plans for the thesis were to explore the place of visual art and Surrealism in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. The PhD, which she sadly was unable to complete, would also examine the work of some women artist filmmakers in relation to the feminine and the lesbian. Sandra’s own films, which embrace these themes, would be part of this. I quote:

The idea of eruption is a volcano, a breaking in the boundary of skin, or the Earth, the root of the word is rupture. I have these notes: eruption, rupture, suture and disruption, all of which apply to the way that images emerge in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the films of Sarah Pucill who has the same initials as Sylvia Plath. Eruption is part of the film as poem, where events unfold without verbal commentary. The film as text becomes the camera speaking, if it is done purely with visuals. And if it is done with sound it becomes a dialectic between sound and silence, where the spaces are occupied rhythmically by the silences in relation to the image which is perceived by the seeing eye. The fractured subjective eye, the psychic ”I” experiences a dialectic, a lively interchange back and forth between the sound, the silence and the visual which perhaps only hieroglyphics as a verbal language have been able to do.

1 Sandra was studying at Queen Mary University with Jacqueline Rose and sadly died before completing it.

Eruption, rupture, suture and disruption apply very much to the language of Sandra’s films, which are tightly woven, produced frame by frame as a film poetry of montage. The “camera speaking” resonates with Sandra’s mode of filmmaking, often a hand-held camera. Michael O’Pray described her films having a “with gloves off approach.” Her camera was part of her body. An open mouth to capture what is in front of it, the vital moment. Her method was impulsive; she calculated the aperture reading not from a light meter, but from the position of the sun in the sky, the status of clouds and time of year. She knew what she needed to film for the edit, and what she wanted to overlay or juxtapose it with. She worked with certainties: The plan decided in advance.

Her film language incorporated much super-imposition in frame which she did either as an “in camera” process on 16mm film, only possible on a Bolex camera or in post production on an optical printer. She was especially skilled at both. The former (she taught me) involves shooting, re-winding and shooting again. With the optical printer, she was able to overlay still images (35mm slide transparency) with 16mm footage or Super 8 footage. This method is calculated frame by frame (24 frames of each second of film) where each frame of film is sutured to either another film frame or a still image. Sandra’s use of the word hieroglyphic speaks, to the frame by frame construction method that her work with the optical printer entailed. She used the word “stitch” to describe the way in which Plath’s voice is incorporated into her films. A frame by frame embodiment of her voice per syllable to Sandra’s layering of images and sound. Forming a tapestry of word, light and sound, of embedded combinations, forcing a fusion between the two art forms (literature and filmmaking), each frame a hieroglyphic shape as an intermedial signifier between word and image, light and sound. This entails also a co-authorship between artists alive at different times, yet sutured across time, enforcing a “speaking” of Plath’s voice inside Lahire’s camera.

Arrows (1984)

Superimposition of image was core to much of Sandra’s early films that employed animation techniques with live action. Her first landmark, highly condensed film, collages drawings, animation (2D and 3D), live action, and photo-collage of magazine cut outs. In between the two dimensional animation, is live action of Sandra (first clothed then naked) and a caged bird. Sandra’s voice overlays the film, adopting different points of view. First fellow sufferers of anorexia lead us into their space of feeling alone, frightened, isolated, in pain and unable to communicate. We then hear a man’s voice shouting exercises for women to loose weight, to which cut up and cut out magazine images of women’s body parts appear to move through animation technique to the orders of his instruction. The montage has impact, both comical and macabre. The orchestrating of two-dimensional body parts as “movements to keep trim” is mixed with drawings of ribs and bones, and still photographs of Sandra’s face and body and an X-ray of a skeleton. Sandra then inhabits the voice of the cosmetic surgeon who practices in London. She reads Monsieur Le Bon’s method: “He marks out the areas from which fat needs to be removed, then under general anaesthetic he injects a liquidising solution which helps dissolve the unwanted fat pads in the area… then aspirates it with a suction tube rather like a vacuum cleaner.” The sarcasm is inflected with the acknowledgment of the mechanics of internalised oppression, but also how easy it is to play the game from the puppet master’s perspective. The political is active. There is a breaking in a boundary between the anorexic sufferers who through the filmmaking process are no longer isolated, whereas the once empowered surgeon is.

Then later Sandra performs a speech of distress: She cannot get help from anyone, no one is listening or cares (her therapy centre), revealing her helplessness, confusion, rejection and isolation, all her words. A symmetry of scale matches the close-up of the owl’s eyes with Sandra’s camera lens. The bird claws are scaled to parallel Sandra’s outstretched fingers as she rotates in a confined space, unable to escape, whilst we hear feathers flutter at cage bars. Both Sandra and the bird take everything in but are unheard despite the noise they are making. Then Sandra speaks of the pleasure and excitement of being only seven stone (she was tall and large boned), as she feels younger, more interesting, and looks better. This jars with her earlier expression of distress, helplessness and confusion that we assume is related to not being able to eat and which, added to the inhabiting of Monsieur Le Bon, ruptures any sense of a coherent voice. Finally we hear selected lines of Plath reading her poem “The Thin People”, which examines the power and impact of witnessing starvation. Sandra’s animated figures correspond to “the people in the mud hut…” as these words from the poem are read out, whose presence haunts the onlooker as a ghost long after their death. Sandra’s mouth is open, replacing the earlier image of her camera lens “open”, but as with the wise bird, her body is unable to escape her cage and eat. The collisions of point of view create eruptions of a schizophrenic world that speaks as much of relations between men and women in Western cultures as between those who are protected with enough food to eat and those who are not. The splitting of her own mind-set speaks of the condition of the environment she has digested, thus reflecting directly the sickness of the social world.

Night Dances (1995)

Night Dances is (for me) Sandra’s most pleasurable film. In it Sandra writes her own script that is interspersed with lines from poems by Plath as an accompaniment to Sandra’s text, a life-long appreciation of the poet’s words, already woven as an underlay into the body of Sandra’s own vocabulary. This is enriched with Sandra’s haunting music score, “Displacement” that includes fragments of Schubert, Gershwin, and Yiddish themes. The film starts with a night shot, a silhouette of a woman (Sarah Turner) lying at the bow of the sail boat that tips up and down to the rhythm of the water, night air and a mesmerising piano playing. We are told the filmmaker’s mother was “… the one solid spaces lean on, envious”  —  a line from Plath’s poem “Nick and the Candlestick”. Then we see Sandra playing the piano overlaid with the water surface, her back to us, composed, as if behind the scene, orchestrating our emotions whilst offering her image to us. Characteristic of Lahire’s film language, this piano playing, a lesbian couple (Fran Hegarty and Cécile Chich) dancing, underground cityscapes, catacombs and close-up “parts” of all these including the boat and water, return intermittently throughout the film. This follows the form of music where a phrase repeats in different guises. The optical printer is the instrument upon which the film is made, which largely consists of super-imposed interwoven 16mm film shots. Words by Lahire and Plath are embraced with light and sound, forming a rich tapestry with the piano score and aural effects. Beginning as a collaboration with her mother and ending as a film of mourning after her sudden death, the film takes us for a rocky ride on an unmoored boat. It is an aesthetics of raw emotion swinging between ecstasy and descent, rising to a point of collapse, erupting into a crashing dread, then a fast fall. The hardness of metal is audible as its weight clatters and clangs. Patterns of architectural abstraction, rectangles and lines appear as unidentifiable shapes

of light, then graduate to identifiable part objects, then objects that register as a “thing”, as the actual world comes and goes. Upside-down boat and piano fragments, hammer and strings, sail ropes, inside and outside, upright, upturned, object parts enmesh as catastrophic disintegration.

The body is lowered into the ground, a spade shuffles soil into the underground hole. The screen goes black. Similar shapes coalesce; the coffin is juxtaposed with the same scaled piano key, and ground tile of the catacomb, rectangular blocks, followed by rectilinear marks in the road. From musical discord, sparkles of light and sound crashes, there is explosion, fireworks, a Catherine wheel in slow mo. This then breaks into a celebration. We hear Sandra’s voice, “after you died we became lovers.” From heartbreak to “a party to be had,” there is champagne, the lovers waltz, rejoice in music and dance, the end is a beginning. Underground shots of catacombs and rail stations where lesbian lovers meet offers a subtext, a love in hiding maybe also a life  —  the night itself is that of hidden love. Sparks of light flash in the sky, and bounce on the river surface with the women and night air. At its centre, the solid of the boat, the underground. Beneath the surface of the ground what is solid is submerged in water whilst the couple dance as an exorcism with the waves. The music, wind, water, and words, gradually lift up and through the erupting catastrophe. From the prolonged tension of an upturned landscape comes resolve and stabilisation. Sandra plays the piano now upright classically posed, a whole image, enchanting us with her playing, the same fingers that turned the lens, wrote the script and threaded the printed weave of sound light.

There is virtuosity2 in the hand-fabricated composition and synthesis of all the parts. Night Dances steers a path between energy and matter: the pure flow of strings and waves, both planetary elements and ingredients of film, with its crystallisation as material form. Out of the darkness comes a warmth that soothes the pain; the exhilaration from the cold and dark, the after effect from having been dipped in iced water. A key line of Sandra’s in the film is “Tears and joy live in every letter  —  more than time can tell.” Is this Sandra speaking of the building brick that is the base and basis of what she has composed in this film?

Sandra’s first film, Arrows and penultimate film Night Dances, bookend all her films that were hand-made by Sandra who did all the camerawork and more.3 Arrows and Night Dances both speak directly from Sandra’s life experiences of anorexia and bereavement head on, and whilst highly personal, her writing in both is in company. In these first and penultimate films, Sandra’s private voice is most clear, if not loud. The cross disciplinarity of composition (music, sound, text and visual weave) reaches a height of virtuosity, and through that the trail of a journey of overcoming.

Sandra’s spirit and her films have had an immense impact on me and my filmmaking. I was simply stunned when I first saw Night Dances, which impacted our partnership in life. She refused to be “straightened out” by the rules of conformism in her artistic practice, in which, for her, the aesthetic and politic were conjoined. Her collaborations with a dead artist (the words she used in reference to Plath) was the major influence of my two films in dialogue with Claude Cahun.4 The Arts Council of England demand “a new departure” for each funding proposal. Sandra believed in sustained research to acquire depth. I’m with Sandra.

January 2021

2 My use of the word “virtuosity” arises out of recent conversations with Nina Danino for a collection of interviews that she is compiling. Danino used this word to describe work by women experimental filmmakers at the

London Film-Makers’ Co-op in the 1980s and 1990s, as a hands-on method of filmmaking where technical skill is part of the artistic language. 3 Sandra’s final film Johnny Panic (2000) was mostly shot in a studio. 4 Magic Mirror (2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (2016).

p. 63 Eerie, photocopied storyboard, Sandra Lahire, 1992. Courtesy of Sarah Turner. p. 64-65 Night Dances, photographic still, Sandra Lahire, 1995.