Filmography

Arrows

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1984, 16mm, colour, 15 min

Alison Fox played the dulcimer. Sylvia Plath read her poem “The Thin People”. Thanks to the women that replied to a letter about anorexia in Feminist Art News and the Women’s Therapy Centre. Made at St. Martin’s School of Art. Arrows uses a combination of live action and rostrum work to communicate the experience of anorexia and to analyse the cultural causes of the condition. “I am so aware of my body,” we are told on the soundtrack, whilst images of caged wild birds are intercut with images of the rib cage of the film’s subject, the filmmaker herself. Taking the camera into her own hands, and revealing this process to the spectator by using a mirror, the filmmaker shows herself in control of this representation of a woman’s body. The film ends with Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Thin People” which speaks of people who starve themselves, and people who are actually deprived, locating the condition of anorexia firmly in Western patriarchal culture. (LUX)

Edge

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1986, 16mm, colour, 12 min

Synthetiser and sung by Kate Bradley War and violence against women in videos and on the news. This short, named after Sylvia Plath’s last poem, is about the woman who is a daughter; icy, perfected and petrified for the patriarchy. She is also a mother drawing her two children with her into this death-in-life. Edge is the irony, which is the poet’s defiance. And it is the blade… how far can those controllers go with their instruments and armaments and still act as though our pieces and feelings can be stuck together again? There is no illusion of the woman’s “resistance”. Yet in this theme of woman as medical and war guinea-pig the silent scream becomes audible in lines of poetry and song. (Sandra Lahire)

Terminals

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1986, 16mm, colour, 20 min

With Frankie Earnshaw, Inge Lahire [Madsen], Maria McMahon, Cathy Morley, Kate Novaczek. Sound effects: Inge Lahire [Madsen]. Clarinet: Giora Feidman. Contact: Zohl de Ishtar (Women Working for a Nuclear free and Independent Pacific) Terminals exposes women’s corporeal vulnerability to techno-patriarchal culture through a filmic exploration of the working conditions of female workers at nuclear power stations. Voices of women describe their heightened exposure to the risks of lung cancer, miscarriage, Down syndrome or neurological damage, while deeply affecting images and sounds attempt to give tangible form to this intangible threat. Echoing the way that the nuclear workers’ bodies are harmed by exposure to radiations, the filmstrip is constantly overexposed, burned to the point of the image’s near-disappearance. (programme notes for From Reel to Real, Tate Modern 2016)

The “work faster” ethic is written on the door to the terminals. Hazards to fertility or risks of cancer are not criteria in setting “acceptable” levels of exposure to radiation at work. At the Visual Display Terminal, women are staring directly at a source of radiation. Bomb tests and waste disposal are the white man’s cancer imposed on the people of the Pacific. (Sandra Lahire)

Plutonium Blonde

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1987, 16mm, colour, 16 min

With Maria McMahon. Andy Ironside  —  use of studio at “Diverse Reports”. Voices of Rachel, Sarah, Stephen Knight and Mark Sheehan. Sound: Arne Nordheim. Help & advice: Inge Garner Lahire [Madsen], Mary Samuels, Socialist Environment Association, Noski Deville, Tina Keane. Part of a trilogy of films on radiation, this dystopic collage frames the fractured narrative of Thelma, a woman working with the monitors in a plutonium reactor. Plutonium blonde, a color reference usually used in beauty products, becomes the reality of the female body in the chemical factory. Through phonic collages of casual conversations and children’s lullabies that are disrupted by the fumes of factories and the threat of a nuclear war, Sandra Lahire’s film confronts

the viewer with difficult questions around the damaged bodies that inhabit a chemical reality and the female identity during such a crisis. (Mariana Sánchez Bueno)

In Plutonium Blonde (1987) narrative coherence enters with the very first image, a figure, supposedly the eponymous blonde, deliriously operating switches, then soon enough engineers operating what we assume to be a nuclear power plant, white boiler suits dropping control rods into cuboid voids to the accompaniment of playground song. The colour set conducts nauseating swerves, as if induced by a giant electromagnet, bleached-out, indigo-toned. As toxic as the colours are, they still hold an allure. Colour is an active participant, asserting the images with a sort of consistency and disturbance. And colour signifies an invisible atomic danger. Through colourisation, naturalness and reality gain ambiguity. Lahire combines the labour force of the nuclear plant with the laboured production of femininity, treating both as nuclear processes (reactions); the colourisation or dyeing of the film acts as a transmitter between the two. As Marina Grzinic contends, “There is no difference between the politics of the medium and the politics of the topic; both are reunited in a clash of layers within deadly light. Radioactivity is deployed as a radioactivity of the film image in itself.” And turns everything against itself: “Even the drinking water  —  you can’t drink it to save your life.”(Kerstin Schroedinger)

Uranium Hex

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1987, 16mm & video, colour, 12 min

Research & invaluable help: I. Garner Lahire [Madsen], Fred and Anna-Maria, Claudette Wilkie, Lis Rhodes, Dr. E. Becker, Winona Laduke. Voices of Denise Hawrysio, Bill Burns. People of Elliot Lake: Linda Wilkins, Mary Jane, Manon. Women in Film: Sandra Lahire, Emina Kurtagic. Children: Rachel, Sarah, Stephen and Daniel Knight. Strings: Noski Deville. Sound equipment: Noski Deville, Nick Gordon-Smith, John Wynne, Derek Taylor. 16mm camera: Sandra Lahire. Video camera: Tina Keane. Production help: LFMC, Four Corners, Filmatic. Produced for the Arts Council of Great Britain and “Illuminations”. Editor/Director: Sandra Lahire. Using a kaleidoscopic array of experimental techniques, this film explores uranium mining in Canada and its destructive effects on both the environment and the women working in the mines. A plethora of images ranging from the women at work to spine-chilling representations of cancerous bodies are accompanied by unnerving industrial sounds and straightforward information from some of the women. (luxonline)

Uranium hexafluoride is a highly poisonous, colourless, crystalline, radioactive matter which is used in the uranium enrichment process to produce fuel for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Uranium Hex proceeds in a similar soundcolour-visual collage with a repetitive layering. At once projecting her materials into a nuclear future with hundreds of thousands of years of half-life and exploring the destructive effects of radiation on bare skin, Lahire herself notes, “I am working on acid-coloured printing and video performance techniques, treating voices and fields of industrial sounds as well as making local speech come to the foreground of the composition.” (Kerstin Schroedinger)

Serpent River

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1989, 16mm, colour, 32 min

Advice and help: Peter Johnson, Gilbert Oskaboose, Beatrice Meawissiga, Mary Ann Beaudry, Linda Wilkins, Barbara Fazekas. Children: Donna Allison, Amy Cameron, Hazim Sheikh. Contacts: Claire Dimock, Bob Manuel, Denise Doiron. Production: LFMC, Four Corners. Thanks to: Gina Gables, Nick Gordon-Smith, Moira Sweeney, Shahnaz Hussain, Suzy Ilbrey, Carol Salter. Guitar Composition: Paul Joseph Battah. Guitar Player: Jo Robbins. Frequency Generator: Alfred G. Lahire. Hands with X-rays: Elaine Burrows. Editing Help: Lis Rhodes. Sound Recordist: Inge Madsen. Editing/Camera/Direction: Sandra Lahire. Produced for the Arts Council of Great Britain and Channel Four Television. Beautiful but often violent images are interwoven to create an experimental documentary about the hazardous existence of the Serpent River community living in the shadow of uranium mines in Ontario, Canada. Serpent River is the final part of a trilogy (see Uranium Hex and Plutonium Blonde) of anti-nuclear films in which the filmmaker makes visible the invisible menace of radioactivity. (BFI Player) People, the landscape and natural resources all bear the scars. A matterof-fact narration by a woman miner and a radiation expert lend emphasis to the film’s unconventional and evocative images. (Cinenova screening)

Lady Lazarus

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1991, 16mm & video, colour and b&w, 24 min

With the voice of Sylvia Plath and performance by Sarah Turner. With special thanks to Olwyn Hughes. Assistant camera: Robin Sheppard. Production Assistant: Helena Bullivant. Camera & Lighting: Sandra Lahire and Nicola Baldwin. Sound Editor: Anna Ksiezopolska. Executive producer: Kate Ogborn. Producer: Gill Henderson. Edited &

Directed by Sandra Lahire. A BFI production in association with Channel Four Television. Sylvia Plath introduced her Lady Lazarus reading by saying: “The speaker is a woman who has a great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix... She is also just a good plain resourceful woman.” In this film Lady Lazarus is a woman irresistibly drawn towards Plath’s voice. She becomes a medium for Sylvia, as in a séance, as the film travels between Massachusetts and Camden. Bringing together the poet’s voice with a kaleidoscope of rich images, Sandra Lahire’s film explores a cinematic alphabet for Plath’s own readings of her poetry and extracts from an interview given just before her death. (LUX/BFI Player)

Eerie

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1992, 16mm, b&w, 1 min

In collaboration with Sarah Turner and Helena Bullivant A magical film loop, combining a Berlin Lesbian decadence with falling in love in a cablecar, high above the slopes of Mount Pilatus. Inspired by German expressionist filmmaking, with in-camera dissolves. (Sandra Lahire) Part of a longer (unmade) film called Necropolis.

Night Dances

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1995, 16mm, colour, 15 min

“Displaced” piano-playing by Sandra Lahire, based on fragments of Schubert, Gershwin and klezmer themes. Featuring Inge Madsen, Cécile Chich, Sarah Turner, Fran Jacobson and Sarah Knight. Inspired by Sylvia Plath’s “The Night Dances”. Funded by the Arts Council of England Night Dances is for my mother, who died whilst helping me to make this piano musical. The Dance of Death is bound to life  —  Lechaim  —  as we whirl together by Hebrew gravestones. A dreaming woman is ferried through our decaying city. This is the age of the Personal Computer  —  the Private Catacomb for the switched-on elite. Its dark doorways are for the wandering homeless… true survivors. (Sandra Lahire)

“Such coldness, forgetfulness. / So your gestures flake off - / Warm and human, then their pink light / Bleeding and peeling / Through the black amnesias of heaven. / Why am I given / These lamps, these planets / Falling like blessings, like flakes [...]”

Night Dances borrows its title from the Sylvia Plath poem cited above. An overlaying of light and dark imagery accompanied by a piano creates a visual dance that invites the viewer to meditate on the dualities of darkness and brightness, on love, illness, life, and death. The relationship with a mother and the relationship with a lover become a ritual of memory and reality invoked by performance and archival recreation. (Mariana Sánchez Bueno)

Johnny Panic

Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 2000, 16mm & video, colour, 46 min

A Maya Vision International Production for the British Film Institute and the Arts Council of England. Inspired by Fragments of Sylvia Plath’s Journals, The Bell Jar, Poetry, and her short story called Johnny Panic. With Nicola Winterson, Cécile Chich, Ali Bye, Lynn Caral, Sarah Turner and Liane Harris. Conceived, Edited and Directed by Sandra Lahire. Produced by Sally Thomas. Director of Photography: Jonathan Collison. Art Director: Janice Flint. Sound Recordist: Barnaby Templer. Still Life Camerawork & Editing Advice: Sarah Pucill. Sound Design: Steve Felton. Thanks to Andy Powell, David Leister, Belinda Parsons, Helena Bullivant, Kate Forrest. Special thanks to Rebecca Dobbs & Olwyn Hughes. The final film of Lahire’s Plath trilogy, Johnny Panic is also her longest and most ambitious. The film arises from and shares its name with the writer’s posthumously published short story, and borrows liberally from the broader body of her work to create a loose patchwork of institutionalisation and revolt. Articulated through dreams, Johnny Panic darts between recollections of familial trauma and the prosecution of the Rosenbergs in Cold War-era New York to unleash a vision of dread, and a resounding dignity in spite of it. (Mariana Sánchez Bueno)

The information on cast & crew has been retrieved from the credits of the films themselves. Sandra Lahire’s films are distributed by LUX and Cinenova (both in London). www.lux.org.uk www.cinenova.org

Colophon

Published on the occasion of the programme dedicated to Sandra Lahire at the Courtisane Festival 2021. This publication was compiled, edited and published by Courtisane and the research project Their Past is Always Present at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola.

Edited by María Palacios Cruz and Charlotte Procter

With the help of Paula González García and Mariana Sánchez Bueno

Copy editing by María Palacios Cruz and Mariana Sánchez Bueno

Series editor: Pieter-Paul Mortier

Graphic design by Gunther Fobe

Printing by Graphius

Thanks to

All the authors, Steven Ball, Cinenova, Benjamin Cook, Julia Cortegana, Hannah Knight, Pablo La Parra, LUX, Michael Mazière, Carlos Muguiro, Sarah Pucill, Felipe M. Retamal, Lucy Reynolds, Lis Rhodes, Clara Sánchez-Dehesa, Sarah Turner, Mark Webber The group of students who participated in the research project Their Past is Always Present in 2018/2019: Elizabeth Dexter, Paloma Hernández, Agustín Ormaechea, Jugatx Otero Bilbao, María Laura Ríos, Alfredo Ruiz, Carlos Saldaña, Andrea Sánchez, Mon Sisu Satrawaha

Images courtesy of Cinenova Distribution and LUX, London.

The publisher has sought to observe the statutory regulations in respect of copyright, but has been unable to ascertain the provenance of the reproduced documents with certainty in every case. Any party believing they retain a right in this regard is requested to contact the publisher.

Courtisane is supported by the Flemish Community / Vlaamse Gemeenschap, Stad Gent, KASK / School of Arts www.courtisane.be

Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola is supported by Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia www.zine-eskola.eus