Sandra Lahire
Biography
Sandra Lahire was born in 1950. She studied Philosophy at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne (BA), Fine Art Film at St Martins School of Art (BA 1984) and Film & Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art (MA 1986). Her films have been shown nationally and internationally at cinemas and festivals including Creteil, Locarno, Berlin, Montreal, Sao Paolo, Turin, Jerusalem, Australia and the Philippines. Writings include Lesbians in Media Education published in Visibly Female (ed Hilary Robinson, Camden Press 1987) and articles for Undercut. She also wrote a musical score for Lis Rhodes' film Just About Now. She passed away in 2001.
Known For & Full Filmography3 Titles
Movie - 2000, 2h 15m • as Woman
Cast creates a claustrophobic and haunting space where people and things invade worlds in which they do not normally belong. Lifeless dolls are heaped inside drawers, dolled-up life size figures lie motionless on a windy beach at the water’s edge; a chair rocks in an empty room, a mirror reflects and observes, and a chest of drawers is caressed by the sea. The film has a dramatic sensibility that sets up a false promise of narrative. Its structure, instead, is akin to that of dreams where different scenic spaces collapse and the inanimate and animate interchange. Wide-angled perspectives, shifting points of view and juxtapositions of sound and silence force inner and outer realities to collide, creating an unsettling psychic world.
Movie - 1984, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
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 film-maker herself. The pressures placed upon women to be thin are articulated by an account of a new technique for surgical removal of fat. Once again, a woman who does not conform to male expectations in terms of her body-shape is classified as sick, in need of surgery. The constantly recurring motif of cages, bars and railway lines reiterates the feeling of entrapment throughout the film. Yet, taking the camera into her own hands, and revealing this process to the spectator by using a mirror, the film-maker shows herself in control of this representation of a woman's body.
Movie - 2004, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
Ritualised through performance to camera, Stages of Mourning is Pucill’s journey of bereavement. In as much as this is a meditation on coming to terms with loss, the film is an exploration of how our relationship with the dead is made different through film. The artist orders image fragments of her late lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire. By trying to physically immerse herself into photographs and film footage or by restaging these, Pucill forms a continuous stream of a life of two lovers. Through this doubling and layering, illusions accumulate as if these were a product of a machine that didn’t stop.