While Sandra Lahire (1950-2001) is best known for her live action films, prior to 1986 she was working primarily with animation. These early works have received little attention, possibly because of their experimental approach and difficult subject matter.
Despite these tough issues, Lahire explores them with humour: “There has to be an element of fun with something raw and close to the bone or you don’t come across to other people” (Jo Buxton interviews Sandra Lahire, boiling Experimental Animation Journal, 14:1996).
Throughout her oeuvre Lahire dealt with the impact of technology, ideology, science and medicine on the body. In her animated works, rather than point the camera out at the world, she focused it toward a rostrum table and created the body upon it. Arrows (1984) and Edge (1986) both employ multiple methods to create their urgent and impassioned messages concerning the vulnerabilities, resilience and interconnectedness of embodied beings.
Maud Jacquin (2016) discusses how Lahire worked upon the fragilities of film as though it were a body but she does not detail the specificity of the animation process as one that presents a further surrogate body: that of the animation rostrum table. Treating this table as though it were a body, Lahire layered upon it materials that are associated with the physical. These include cut up photographs of bodies and crude mask like drawings of bruised human faces animated with real objects such as plastic tubing, medical instruments, bandages, surgical gloves, bloody swabs, fur, claws and stand-ins for bodily parts and fluids such as a red capsicum and flowers (See images 1 and 2). Making the process transparent, Lahire’s hands are constantly visible animating these materials, delving into and prizing apart the layers and then bandaging and stitching them back together, as though the caressing gestures might repair at the level of film the damage done in reality. The diverse methods, dense visuals and frenetic pace are grounded by the constancy of Sylvia Plath reciting her poems, The Thin People (1957) and Poem For A Birthday – The Stones (1962).
Edge compares the horrors of vivisection to that of cosmetic surgery. Images of restrained monkeys and cats with screaming mouths, wounds and implants are rapidly smothered over. The butchery that the low resolution animal campaigning photos common to that period can’t clearly depict Lahire reconstructs through compositions of bloody gauzes, spilt entrails, shots of her own eyes and mouth wide open as in terror and claw like scratches dragged directly onto film. Jacquin proposes that the level of violence to the body that is implied through filmic imagery of measuring and medical instruments is amplified by the numerous cuts and incisions of Lahire’s rapid-fire editing method (2016). Throughout Edge an equation is made between animal bodies and that of the artist as Lahire films her own gaze confronting the viewer edited together with the chemically destroyed eyes of rabbits. Lahire alleviates these scenes of distress with ironical commentary at both vocal and visual levels and animation is one tool through which to bring about such lightness: it is humorous to watch slices of salami, compared to the surgical removal of human fat, jerking themselves around the frame, while a group of back-lit razor blades appears without malice, like the geometric shapes of early abstract animation (See image 3).
Jacquin reads the violence in Edge in terms of feminism and as pertaining solely to the female body, whereas the large part of the imagery of the actual violence to bodies as witnessed in these photographs is inflicted not on the female body but on those of animals. Its possible that Jacquin’s reluctance to expand upon Lahire’s filmic associations between women and animals is to save Lahire from possible charges of essentialism. Yet Lahire’s attempt to point out the patriarchal exploitation of both was leading her time. Feminisms of today, such as feminist multispecies theory (Haraway, 2007) and ecofeminism, rather than proposing innate bonds between women and nature continue to make broad connections across ecologies but with a focus on shared experiences of injustice and anthropocentrism (Braidotti, 2013).
Arrows narrows the focus of concern with the suffering body to that of the human condition of anorexia. Imagery of grids, caged birds, spiky red shards, snakes and body parts cut from magazines are moved through limited animation, twisted about on the rostrum table to the soundtrack of exercise class instructions. The isolation experienced by those with anorexia is conveyed through the soundtrack as Lahire’s requests for counsel are met with an answer phone. Throughout Lahire adopts different positions and roles, from that of the media analyst, the scientist, the anguished and skeptical artist, and through to the mimicry of non- humans. In photos she appears wing-like with a shawl draped upon her outstretched arms, suggesting that through weightlessness she will become airborne (See image 4). Shots of a rotating owl head are matched with photos of Lahire as she describes circular swiveling movements while, “her hands replicate the movement of wings” (boiling, 12: 1996). It is as though, in her identification with beings that are trapped in violent systems, the artist is continuously searching for affinities between her own body and that of non-humans.
Rosi Braidotti finds that idealist philosophy positioning of thought as other and higher than matter has meant that animals, relegated to the latter category, are devalued. She proposes a post-human position to be one of a widened subjectivity that rejects anthropocentrism or the limiting of the roles of animals in favour of that which she describes as an assemblage of human-animal interaction (Braidotti, 2013: 81-82). Through devices of animation, montage editing, superimposition and mimicry Lahire sets up an equivalence and inseparability between, not only her own and animal bodies, but also between objects and materials. In this sense she anticipates the recent explosion of post-humanist ecologically oriented art practice (Marcus Coates and Jacqueline Traide) and also the screen based eco-aesthetics of the present day (see for example Anat Pick & Silke Panse, 2013).
Vicky Smith works directly-onto-film using experimental animation and performance to explore the vulnerable and vital body. Her work has screened internationally including, during 2018, ‘Voyages Elsewhere’, Edge of Frame Animation, London; ‘Matters of Being’, Independent Film Show, Naples; ‘Holy Fluids’, Union Docs Center for Documentary Art, New York: ‘Physical Connection’ Edinburgh Film Festival; ‘Resisiting Expectation’, Whitstable Biennale and also at Galway Arts Centre. Recent publications include: BEEF:One Year ofMaterial Practice at The Brunswick Club (http://www.beefbristol.org/writings/) and Experimental & Expanded Animation: Current Perspectives and Practices, co-edited with Nicky Hamlyn. She lectures at the University for the Creative Arts and at The University of the West of England.
Jacquin, Maud (2016) From Reel to Real: Women, Feminism and the London Film-makers Co-operative, London: Tate film. pp. 11.
Panse, Silke (2013), ‘Land as Protagonist – An Interview with James Benning’ in eds. Pick, A. and Narraway . Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
