5 minute read
Living on Air
Interview and review by Gill Addison
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Sandra Lahire has recently completed Living on Air, a trilogy of films inspired by the writing and voice of Sylvia Plath. The festival Handbags and Hardware opens with the world premiere of Johnny Panic, the final chapter of Living on Air, and offers the first chance to see this compelling and beautiful trilogy in its entirety.
A project spanning nine years, Living on Air profiles, responds and concludes within three skillful intelligent films the work and life of Plath, who is portrayed as a writer, woman and independent soul free from the constraints that the literary establishment wishes to impose upon our memory of her.
In 1991 Lahire made Lady Lazarus, which sets out and introduces Plath’s life and poetry. Lady Lazarus also begins to outline Lahire’s creative concerns with film itself and the project which later evolved into this trilogy. Her interest in Plath began in response to both a personal bereavement and an image of someone’s silhouette standing by the window of the house in which Plath had died. This haunting image stayed with Lahire and was later to reappear as a reoccurring image within Lady Lazarus. This image is more than a motif, and for Lahire it acts as a link to Plath, and as her touchstone within the film. “I had always been interested in the double edge between life and death” says Lahire, and Plath “is the only poet that I think has travelled in a personal landscape of death, while at the same time writing in a language that is completely of life: trees growing rings, horses galloping.”
The film combines images of Plath’s home in Massachusetts, and themes from her poetry. Images and themes reoccurring in the later films creating an index of symbols, signs and metaphors. The postcard images of places of importance to Plath: her grandparents house, her college and her own portraits are hauntingly combined with Plath’s own voice from both interviews and readings of her poems. Throughout Lady Lazarus, visual images of the text from Plath’s poems and journals punctuate the screen images. These create a layered film, both physically and metaphorically, with Plath’s voice leading and navigating through the complex imagery. Lahire wanted to experiment within film “to see if people could just sit together in a cinema and close their eyes, and go on a journey.” It was particularly important to Lahire that she use Plath’s distinctive voice as a means of evoking her presence through the film, but also because her readings infuse her poetry with a powerful and vivid resonance which pierces through the visual experience of the film. “I wanted the audience to be able to close their eyes and listen to the film.”
Night Dances was made in response to the need to work within a less controlled funding environment. Of the three films Lahire feels that this is her film. Two female couples glide and dance throughout the film, which is set in London. The women’s journeys take them from the Thames and through cemeteries, accompanied by a haunting piano music. Night Dances’ imagery is abstracted and less grounded as a translation of Plath’s poems and her life. Again Plath’s voice is used, but edited skilfully... words are repeated and isolated, ending in abrupt silences. Night Dances is more of a response to Plath than Lady Lazarus, and it is an intensely personal film for Lahire, whose mother helped make the film, but who died while it was still in production.
The final film of the trilogy is Johnny Panic. Within this film Lahire deftly combines the fictional aspects of Plath’s writing with the stark reality of her life. Johnny Panic is a filmic and poetic text that evokes and adds to Plath’s own dreams in the story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”, and which grounds Plath’s own recorded statement: “one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying — like madness and being tortured...”
Dramatic lighting, a heightened sense of rich colour achieved through the use of 16mm film and an enclosed set,
further evoke Plath’s text and influence upon the films and upon Lahire. As Lahire herself states: “Plath was a very colour separated person in her text: black and white, blood red and cornflower blue, gold and purple. There is nothing in between. I can’t be bothered with that myself, because it’s too much the proper film aesthetic that you’re supposed to get, with all the shades in between. I do prefer really extreme saturated colours.”
Johnny Panic is a complexly constructed film, both visually, practically and metaphorically. The set of Johnny Panic serves as many different spaces: the doctor’s clinic, the secretary’s office, the mind. The screens even act as the pages of Plath’s books, with images back-projected onto them. “For the economy of filmmaking I felt that a clock-work Bolex gives a very specific aesthetic and an enclosed set and light sources suggest images and voices coming out of a black void; and this directly relates to how memory works. Coming out of the black spaces of the mind. Zooming through the space only to disappear again.”
As in all the films’ imagery, character fragments of text and themes reoccur, yet like Plath’s work these are reworked. Lahire saw this shape-shifting as intrinsically linked to cinema. “When you go around all her work the same images come up again and again in different guises. It’s really shape-shifting in the sense of taking on a form — from becoming a tiny grain of rice in a pot that is being boiled, and then shooting herself off to becoming Ariel or an arrow. All these different forms and dynamics suggested to me a cinematic eye. They can be created with things like jump-cuts and flash-backs, zoom, point of view; and yet not every thing has been discovered, not all is up there to be defined, but some kind of bottomless depth.”
Although presented as a trilogy, the films can be equally enjoyed individually. While Lahire’s films are undoubtedly inspired by and responses to the work and life of Sylvia Plath, the evolution of this work shows as much about Lahire’s practice as it does about Plath’s work. The films consider and sensitively represent the work of Plath in a new and refreshing light, without appearing as simply illustration. All three films astutely straddle the personal and the theoretical, while at the same time being a truly aesthetic cinematic experience.
Sandra Lahire’s Living on Air will be screened at 7pm on Thursday, 10 February 2000 at the Lux Cinema, as part of Handbags and Hardware, the festival of women’s film organised by Cinenova.
Thanks to Sandra Lahire.
Originally published in Filmwaves, Issue 10, Winter 2000.
p. 72 Necropolis, ‘lights / colours’ page from proposal, Sandra Lahire, 1992. Courtesy of Sarah Turner. p. 73 Necropolis, ‘lighting’ page from proposal, Sandra Lahire, 1992. Courtesy of Sarah Turner.
