"We say the same thing in different ways"
On Sandra Lahire and Sylvia Plath
by Emily LaBarge

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“We walk on air, Watson,” writes Sylvia Plath – the poet of Ariel and other striking, singular collections of poetry, prose, letters, and journals – in ‘The Detective’. This poem about romantic loss is loaded with regret and suspicion of infidelity. The atmosphere courses with it and buoys the speaker in her search for answers that never arrive: she walks on air. Air recurs in other poems, to varied effects: “We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, / Me and you,”[1] “Something else / Hauls me through air,”[2] “The air is a mill of hooks,”[3] and “There’s always a bloody baby in the air.”[4] Plath’s work is filled with references to air as image, feeling, form, theme. In her imaginary, air is mobile and muscular, full of contradictions: it is thin or pale or quiet or fluent or clear or blind or thick. Sometimes it is murderous. Air is sweet or bloody, blue or orange, sometimes green, often black – so changeable, substanceless, full of portent and nourishment, always a vehicle.

“As a poet, one lives a bit on air,” we hear Plath say in ‘Lady Lazarus’, the first film in Sandra Lahire’s Living on Air trilogy, a series of works made in dialogue with the life, writings, and recorded voice of the American poet who died in London in 1963, aged 30, when Lahire was barely a teenager. This audio clip of Plath – one of many that scores the film – comes from a 1962 conversation with Peter Orr of the British council, in which she describes life as a poet, and its sometimes chimerical, insubstantial qualities. When Plath says “air,” it feels as if her deep voice curves around the listener. Her accent is uncanny, not quite British or American, with rounded vowels and bevelled sibilants. “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air,” she writes in the poem that gives Lahire’s film its title. How to define the space between poetry and air, text and image, film and homage, Plath and Lahire?

The writer and scholar Jacqueline Rose, who supervised Lahire’s PhD about the role of visual art and Surrealism in Plath’s poetry, described her student as possessing deep insight into the “psychic landscape of Plath’s writing,” noting that Lahire’s “ability in both her films and her writing, to enter and seize that landscape, and then bring it into an acutely sharpened focus, was astounding.”[5] Unfinished at the time of her death in 2001, aged 50, Lahire’s PhD was also to involve an exploration of the work of a selection of women artist filmmakers, including herself. We can’t know what she might have written about her connection to Plath, or why the poet served as muse and material for so many of her works, nor if the trilogy would have been her final engagement with Plath’s work. It seems certain her “collaborations with a dead artist,” as Lahire put it, would have continued in some way, be it direct or oblique. As it stands, the trilogy’s films – ‘Lady Lazarus’ (1991), ‘Night Dances’ (1995), and ‘Johnny Panic’ (1999) – present a fascinating, intuitive correspondence with Plath’s work, an exchange that ripples through them in multiple, though never didactic, ways. Lahire’s supple montages of image, text, and sound offer reflexive studies of both Plath and film as medium. “Drawing breath from each other,” Lahire says in her 1985 essay, ‘Lesbians in Media Education,’ “we say the same thing in different ways.”[6]

The first film in the trilogy, ‘Lady Lazarus’, opens with a gnomic, provocative statement in white print against a black background:

a film spoken by

SYLVIA PLATH

27 OCT. 1932 — 11 FEB. 1963

This title card states the work is “spoken” by Plath, while the credits at the end cite the poems Sylvia Plath “spoke,” as if the poet has been in contact with Lahire, collaborating in the making of the film. Plath indeed speaks the film, whose soundtrack is dominated by clips of her reading her poems from two separate recording sessions: the first in 1958, at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard, and the second in 1962, for the BBC, which also included the aforementioned interview with Peter Orr. Plath’s poems, prose, and conversational statements are chopped up and reconstituted in a poetic montage in which Lahire has absorbed Plath’s world of stark, riveting imagery, filmically transforming it into something visually her own that speaks to themes which preoccupied both women: pilgrimage, identification, intimacy, dialogue, channelling, longing, loss, violence, power, and the body. ‘Lady Lazarus’ is a study of how to manifest something dark and conflicted that lives deep within us: a ‘psychic landscape’ created via a fusion of art forms and their two authors, doubled and intertwined.

Lahire constructs brief, fragmented sequences in vivid 16mm: a Ouija board as seen through a fish-eye lens, a crystal ball, reeds rippling in lapis blue waters, a cut hand smearing fake, postbox red blood across a white plate, a graveyard, flickering candles and flames, a blooming lily, a close-up starfish, a hospital, an axe chopping wood, female mannequins, a horse galloping. These images, consistently evoked by Plath, are made anew, filmed and reassembled by Lahire, who was intimately familiar with the poet’s recurrent visuals. She viewed the Plath’s insistent repetition of particular themes and imagery as a kind of “shape-shifting in the sense of taking on a form” that migrates from one version of itself to another – travelling “in a personal landscape of death, while at the same time writing in a language that is completely of life.”[7]

Lahire makes the poet’s life appear, too, in flashes: her childhood home in Winthrop, Massachusetts; Point Shirley, the New England coast where she spent her summers; the gravestone of her father Otto Plath, who died when she was eight; Smith College, where she did her undergraduate degree; New York, where she had a nervous breakdown; the house on Fitzroy Road, just north of Primrose Hill, where she died in the freezing winter of 1963; her grave in Yorkshire, SYLVIA PLATH HUGHES – the “Hughes” visibly chiselled off and replaced numerous times.[8] Whenever Plath’s poems are read, they are resurrected through the film’s very own Lady Lazarus – a surrogate for perhaps both filmmaker and poet, seeker and sought – played by a dark-haired woman (Lahire’s friend and collaborator, the filmmaker Sarah Turner) who tours the US and the UK, where Lahire travelled widely to make the film. What does this inscrutable Lady Lazarus want, what does she see or feel when she visits these memorials to her author? Kinship, maybe, or an explanation for how deeply the psychic landscape of another person can embed itself within you and spill forth, keep on spilling.

As our guide, Turner walks us backward and forward through Plath’s landscapes, both biographical and writerly. “The young woman in this film is magnetised into Plath’s dialogue and photos,” wrote Lahire in a 1994 artist’s statement. “She becomes a film medium, as in a séance, and travels Sylvia’s homes and jobs in Massachusetts, NY, and London.”[9] This filmic medium sits at a desk, leafing through facsimiles of Plath’s manuscripts, and holds up photographs of the poet at different ages before dropping them to the floor or tearing them to pieces. She slides a glass across a Oujia board, walks through graveyards, drives a retro pink Cadillac, flips through women’s magazines of the fifties, the kind Plath read and even modelled for in her teenage years. She lingers in the lit window of a house bathed in blue light of the variety Plath described as belonging to the early mornings at Fitzroy Road, when she rose to write at three or four in the morning, during “that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles.”[10] The woman goes into a basement, takes pills, lies down, and perhaps dies, as Plath nearly did in August of 1953, an event recounted in The Bell Jar, and hinted at in ‘Lady Lazarus,’ whose speaker dies and is resurrected every 10 years: “What a trash / To annihilate each decade.” This is the only poem in the film that is read in full, over eerie scenes of the dark-haired woman swathed in gauze, maggots crawling on her face and legs, coins placed over her closed eyes. Plath’s sly, wry voice narrates:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

The 25-minute film plays with structure, technique, and form, exploring pairings of image and text, audio and narrative sequence, and splicing splintered images in quick succession. At times, the juxtapositions are literal and direct. As Plath reads ‘Cut’, for instance: “What a thrill - / My thumb instead of an onion. / The top quite gone / Except for a sort of hinge,” we see a woman’s hand smear a streak of crimson red blood across a stark white plate. At other times, the concordance is associative or aslant, drawing on wider themes within Plath’s work: a chapel (Union Chapel in Highbury) filled with flickering candles as a voice echoes “Love, love”; a photo of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg accompanied by the sound of the subway in New York (a sequence that appears again in the final film of Lahire’s trilogy, ‘Johnny Panic’). Lahire’s elastic filmmaking fills ‘Lady Lazarus’ with repetitions, superimpositions, changes of speed and pace, and layering of sound to reconstitute and mirror the rhythms and rhymes of Plath’s poetry – at once quiet and explosive, joyful and violent. “I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing,” an audio clip of Plath speaking to Orr in 1962 plays over mauve-bathed images of a bell jar and then a whirling fairground ride – a hint at Lahire’s methodology, which employs not just the narrative and visuals of Plath’s work, but also its writerly cadences and line breaks as a means of editing and structuring the film.

In Lahire’s work, film is a site of absorption and porosity, a place in which the slippage between self and other is vital and vivifying – a “magical medium” that “is also a site for a lover’s discourse with the absent/dead.”[11] If ‘Lady Lazarus’ is a direct paean to Plath, ‘Night Dances’ is instead oblique, suffuse, enigmatic, with the poet’s work used as a starting point for a retroactive eulogy to Lahire’s mother, Inge Madsen, who died suddenly while helping her daughter make the film. Some of Plath’s imagery glances in and out – water, poppies, flickering lights, fireworks, that immersive blue atmosphere – as do fragments of two poems, ‘The Night Dances’ and ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, both of which were written about her infant son, Nicholas Hughes. “You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on,” Plath’s voice drifts over Lahire’s images of lapping waves; and later, “Why am I given // These lamps, these planets / Falling like blessings, like flakes // Six-sided, white / On my eyes, my lips, my hair // Touching and melting. / Nowhere.” Both the film and the poem foreground the embodied, platonic sensuousness that exists between mother and child, how absolutely it suffuses the atmosphere.

The majority of the film, however, is suspended in the ether of diffuse loss and memory, languidly focusing on a woman dressed in black (Sarah Turner again) who lies on the prow of a sailboat that bobs up and down in the water. In between this recurring scene, women dance together, slowly, spot lit, and walk through tunnels, the catacombs in Highgate cemetery, abandoned buildings and walkways; we see a Jewish cemetery; hands playing a piano; the word “compassion” spray-painted in white on a brick wall. Perhaps the woman on the boat dreams these images, or dreams them for us, dreams us with her on this lilting, nighttime dance. “Love, love,” a heartbroken voice says (an acoustically distorted clip of Plath reading ‘Fever 103’) at various junctures, somewhere between incantation and mourning. As in ‘Lady Lazarus’, images are fragmented, sutured, and superimposed, creating a hypnotic and ghostly effect. It is as though we are privy to someone’s inner eye sifting through overlapping recollections, desires, and dreams: the film, once more, is a channel to something otherwise inaccessible, maybe lost.

Where Plath’s ‘The Night Dances’ refers to her son and the movements he makes in his crib at night as she watches on, enthralled – “Such pure leaps and spirals – / Surely they travel // The world forever” – Lahire’s film inverts and complicates the relationship between mother and child. Who is dancing and who is watching? Who is found and who is lost? Who sleeps and who wakes? Who dreams, or do we all, in concert? In some scenes, Lahire plays the piano – we see her slender fingers tinkling Schubert, Yiddish folk songs, and a theme she composed herself. In another sequence, a different set of hands – those of her mother – dance along a stone piano discovered in a graveyard, part of a tomb. Mother and daughter, parent and child are collapsed and mirrored. In her poems, Plath, too, used her medium to address the painful loss of a parent. In several poems, she summons her dead father, who died suddenly when she was a child, from complications with a late diagnosis of diabetes. In ‘The Colossus,’ he’s a giant bony sculpture that her speaker tends to with “glue pots and pails of lysol,” trying to keep him tidy and mended. In ‘Full Fathom Five,’ she writes of his watery grave and his bed littered with shells, the poem’s title invoking The Tempest from which her Ariel will later spring: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” In ‘Daddy,’ the speaker’s death is a dark coming home to the afterlife: “At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do.” Poetry is a means to memorialise; to mourn, or sometimes berate (“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”); to imagine his existence in a different, fantastical and ongoing world.

But there is no getting back, back, back to the lost loved one. There is only trying to find a way to hold on, to remain momentarily suspended between life and death, an unresolvable state. “Recently my very closest friend, my mother, died suddenly,” Lahire wrote in the same 1994 artist statement for funding from the British Film Institute. “This has deepened my need for a lifeline of lovers’ conversations between women.” If ‘Lady Lazarus’ brings Plath back to life, an animated psychic current in the here and now, ‘Night Dances’ allows some essence of Lahire’s mother to live again in film. To exhume is perhaps to love, beyond reason and forever – as one loves a mother, or a lover, or a continuity of people who buoy, assert, and affirm existence: a lifeline of lovers’ conversations between women.

In the work of both Plath and Lahire, the imperative to look upon the painful, to delve into personal anguish alongside instances of global and historical cruelty – and to link the two, to find the one in the other – is paramount. In ‘Johnny Panic,’ the final film in the trilogy, the last film Lahire made, this assertion reaches its most fevered pitch. At 45 minutes, the film is the longest in Lahire’s oeuvre, and the most tightly controlled in its staging. At the centre of the work is a narrative hybrid of Plath’s The Bell Jar, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas just before her death, and her short story ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,’ written in 1958 but only published posthumously, a decade later. (Plath spent years sending the story out to various publishers to no avail, and the name Johnny Panic – along with the phrase “Panic Bird” – became a kind of stand-in for failure and fear in her life: “I feel a terrible blocking and chilling go through me like anesthesia,” she wrote in her journal on 4 November 1959, “I wonder, will I ever be rid of Johnny Panic?”)

Like The Bell Jar, the short story considers mental illness and personal anguish as in part a symptom of the society in which we live, with its myriad cruelties and strictures – a condition exacerbated by medical and psychological institutions that punish rather than heal, often in particularly gendered ways. Plath’s story, like her novel, is loosely fictionalised, based on a part-time job Plath had while living in Boston, where she, alongside the poet Anne Sexton, was a student of Robert Lowell. Plath’s job was as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital, where she observed the incoming patients with her writer’s eye, taking down notes of her own from their files to be used later for material – a common practice of hers. In her story, this post turns dangerous and macabre: her character illicitly delves deep into the filing rooms and patient histories of the institution, where she is discovered by a sadistic doctor who punishes her transgressions by administering electro-shock therapy.

Lahire’s film is set in a closed stage surrounded by white medical screens on which vignettes of films and images are projected, some of which reference other passages of the film, as well as Lahire’s previous works. The bone-white space serves as an office, where the protagonist (played by Nicola Winterson) reads and types up files; an operating theatre, where a woman’s body is sliced open and her organs exposed; and an ECT treatment room, where the narrator of the film writhes and arcs in bed as electricity passes through her body and she sees the face of Johnny Panic: “I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory,” we hear in a voiceover. “The air crackles with the blue-tongued, lighting-haloed angels. His love is the twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.” Interspersed with this narrative, which is Lahire’s most straight and literal use of Plath’s work, are retro scenes of Americana (some repeated or familiar from ‘Lady Lazarus’), each with ominous undertones – fairground rides with their canned organ music; naked mannequins; a freak show; the traffic and vertiginous skyscrapers of New York City; Grand Central Station; photos of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and images of a protest decrying their deaths. When recordings of Plath do figure, they are readings from poems  replete with stark and harrowing imagery that invokes, often literally, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, war, and destruction: “I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. / Scorched to the root / My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.”

Both Plath and Lahire were committed to anti-nuclear, pacifist movements, and intensely critical of patriarchal institutions that condemned women to live in pain, fear, illness, and poverty. Plath’s journals and letters are filled with anti-war sentiments and fury at the kinds of mass annihilation that feature vividly in her poems. (One of her first outings with baby Frieda, her first child, was the 1960 Ban the Bomb march where it culminated in Trafalgar Square.) Versions of these concerns and beliefs are at the core of Lahire’s trilogy about radiation, which has a particular focus on how the nuclear industry marks and, effectively, murders female labourers. ‘Johnny Panic’ is a film that focuses on state violence as it affects women’s minds and bodies, and in which, at times, we witness the artist herself as one of the suffering. In between readings from Plath’s diary about her horror surrounding the execution of the Rosenbergs, we are offered glimpses of Lahire’s own body in grainy black and white, emaciated from the anorexia that would claim her life two years later.

It is difficult to behold her visible ribcage and protruding hipbones, her skeletal arms. The image of Lahire’s emaciated body features in many of her more personal films, but here it is unexpected and jarring (as well as retrospectively ominous, given her imminent death), a reminder of the filmmaker’s real, distressed body behind her carefully produced, otherwise seamlessly fictional narrative. What are we to make of this painful self-exposure, particularly alongside scenes in which the film’s story might be read as gothic or camp – deliberately over the top, grotesque, uncomfortable, darkly humourous? “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,” Lahire said. I don’t suggest that illness is funny, nor that Lahire felt her suffering was, only that a body – a person – is never just one thing, but, conversely, is an opening into multiplicity.
 

In her book about Plath’s biographers, The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm takes aim at those critics who refuse to allow for the co-existence of the personal and the collective, the autobiographical and the creative, the individual and the human condition in the poet’s work:

What was exacted from Plath was so far beyond what was expected of the gushing girl with the Samsonite luggage that we must all agree on the singularity of the achievement. How the child, “plump and golden in America,” became the woman, thin and white in Europe, who wrote poems like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” and “Edge,” remains an enigma of literary history—one that is at the heart of the nervous urgency that drives the Plath biographical enterprise, and of the hold that the Plath legend continues to exert on our imaginations.

Malcolm’s lines summon, for me, parallel aspects of Lahire’s project, which  also insists on fusing the personal and the political – in her work, and in her examination of Plath’s – well aware of the degree to which certain female experiences will always inspire doggedly biographical readings. I am riveted by the use of the word “exacted” – which I first misread as “extracted.” Living on Air, and Lahire’s wider oeuvre, like Plath’s, is about what is exacted and extracted from women in life and in art – and what they exact and extract from themselves. The films are about the pain of living, which cannot be solved, but must be beheld. At stake is a politics and an ethics concerning the witnessing of suffering, both small and large, one that is not sick or narcissistic, not about death, but about life and how to insist that we, alongside our beloveds, live on.

Emily LaBarge is a writer based in London. She has written for Granta, the London Review of Books, Bookforum, Tate Etc., Frieze, and The Paris Review, amongst other publications. She is a regular contributor to Artforum and London correspondent for the Montreal-based quarterly, esse arts + opinions. She is currently writing a book about trauma and narrative.

[1] Sylvia Plath, “Lesbos,” in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1981) p.228.

[2] Ibid, “Ariel,” p.239.

[3] Ibid, “Gigolo,” p.267.

[4] Ibid, “Stopped Dead,” p.230.

[5] Jacqueline Rose, “Sandra Lahire,” The Guardian, 13 August 2001 < https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/aug/13/guardianobituaries.filmnews> [accessed 10 March 2022]

[6] Sandra Lahire, “Lesbians in Media Education,” in Living on Air: the films and words of Sandra Lahire, ed. Maria Palacios Cruz and Charlotte Procter (San Sebastián, Spain: Courtisane, 2021), p.16.

[7] Sandra Lahire in Gill Addison, “Living on Air. A Trilogy of Films by Sandra Lahire,” in Living on Air, p.70.

[8] Following Plath’s death, and public arguments about the complicity of her husband, Ted Hughes (who inherited her literary estate), his surname was anonymously chiselled from her gravestone. Hughes replaced it. 

[9] Lahire, “Artist’s Statement since ‘Lady Lazarus’,” in Living on Air, p.81.

[10] Sylvia Plath, quoted by A. Alvarez in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. by Charles Newman, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), p.59.

[11] Lahire, Living on Air, p.81.