Sandra Lahire, Serpent River (1989)
Cinenova Feminist Film and Video Distributor
Irene Revell, Kerstin Schroedinger
Cinenova: Diffracted Landscapes
(published in Camera Austria #130)
What does a feminist landscape look like? Or rather, how does a feminist look at landscape? What if our (point of) view is not a defining one? The landscapes we look at are not to be explored and occupied; but how does our gaze escape these tendencies? Teresa de Lauretis speaks about mechanisms of coherence: she espouses a fundamental suspicion towards narrativity and yet simultaneously argues for its re-articulation, in reference to the narrative strategies in Yvonne Rainer’s films.1 “[F]eminist work in film should be not anti-narrative or anti-oedipal but … working, as it were, with and against narrative in order to represent not just a female desire …; but … the duplicity of the oedipal scenario itself and the specific contradiction of the female subject in it.”2 This duplicity is meant to be specific in regard to the history of cultural forms and also the contexts of reception. In analogy to a suspicion towards narrativity, we assume a suspicion towards a 360-degree pan, a full panoramic picture, a panoptic control scan, amidst other mechanisms of (visual) coherence.
Greenham Common and the Menstrual Hut The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981–2000) was a women-only protest against the threatened deployment of nuclear cruise missiles at Royal-Air-Force Greenham Common in Berkshire, England. Numerous works were produced in this context that take activist, documentary, or social approaches. Within the Cinenova collection, the films also make wider connections with concerns of ecology and the (feminist) body, a coming-to-terms with a growing contamination of public (as much as personal) space.3 In her essay on artist Annabel Nicolson,4 Felicity Sparrow describes the entanglement of these spaces: “The tension between public and personal space, between introspection and action, were further developed, often collaboratively with other women, like the Menstrual Hut in ‘Concerning Ourselves’ (1981) which literally created a private meditative space within a public art gallery.”5 The Women’s Peace Camp functioned as such a space of collaboration, being simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, public and private. This tension may, or may not, take form in a paradoxical structure, as much suspicious of spatial incoherence as coherence. Returning to de Lauretis, it is important to consider narrativity “strategically and tactically in the effort to construct other forms of coherence, to shift the terms of representation, to produce the conditions of representability of another—and gendered—social subject.”6
Sandra Lahire, “Serpent River” (1989)
“Serpent River” is the last work in Lahire’s trilogy7 that creates a dystopian outlook into a radioactive future made in the aftermath of Chernobyl and the proclaimed “end of history”, at the historical moment when the Cold War—with its promises of an endless source of nuclear energy—was falling apart. These three films have a very particular relationship to landscape: totalising through their pulling-in of collaged references and multilayering, yet not panoptic. As much as Lahire creates this heterogeneous coherence, it remains always partial and fleeting; there is no anchor, no vantage point, no origin, and each repeated viewing feels equally cast away. In “Serpent River” the images seep into one another: blue-tinted floods of water, X-rays, positive/negative, skeleton dances, descriptions of physical labour, ice, crystal ice, blue ice, blasted rock, children, radiated pink, day-for-night, skating on ice, reflections of water, reflections of sun, flames burning images. These are all overlaid and simultaneously shifting from one to the next. The montage is not made with sharp cuts, but the sequences seem to rather taint each other in their superimposition. Colour contrasts hurt the eyes; radiant flashes burn into the retina. The soundtrack remains autonomous; aggressive sounds of cutting through ice. Narrative bits are juxtaposed with sci-fi sounds: uranium capital nursery school, uranium in the drinking water, formerly a clean town, generous with the hospital, sulphur cycle, Trans-Canada Highway, drilling, the sound of drilling. The film material simulates X-ray plates or is treated physically, contaminated, raw images exposed over and over again, or brought into bright sub-zero winter. “Serpent River” may be the final film of the trilogy, but it does not come to a conclusion. Just as the nuclear activity will stay—there is no end to it.
“[M]atters of practices/doings/actions”8
In “Serpent River” this narrative coherency materialises in a diffracted way. Lahire shows layers of bright colours, both radiating from and X-raying into the depths of the images. We borrow the term diffraction from Karen Barad, who writes that the problem of representation should be placed in “questions of diffraction rather than reflection”.9 She cautions how each intra-action (or striving for coherence, if we may put it that way) always makes a mark; as soon as one attempt at clarity is made, another is occluded. We might say that this understanding of agency complements de Lauretis’s notion of narrative coherence, whilst also offering a possible account for the simultaneous suspicion. While Barad draws from Niels Bohr’s development of nuclear physics, Lahire uses radioactivity as a formal figure that escapes the patriarchal gaze. Decomposition takes place, not just in the film frames, but in the context of production, in the aspects of perception. Discontinuity—but at the same time also raising the demand for women artists talking, telling their stories. It can be both: “… feminism understands the female subject as one that … is at once inside and outside the ideology of gender …; the female subject is in both places at once. That is the contradiction.”10
A feminist gaze towards landscape can thus be one that doesn’t aim to represent what we see, nor does it reflect on the film image “what is to be seen”. Rather, it enables a vision that is diffracted, in more ways than one, with all that the material can offer at stake.
1 Cinenova distributes “The Man Who Envied Women” (1985) and “Privilege” (1990) by Yvonne Rainer.
2 Teresa de Lauretis, “Strategies of Coherence: Narrative Cinema, Feminist Poetic, and Yvonne Rainer”, in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Universtiy Press, 1987), p. 108.
3 Tina Keane, “In Our Hands, Greenham” (1984); Caroline Goldie, “Greenham Granny” (1986); S. Fonseca, S. Gillie, V. Grut, and J. Holland, “Nuclear Defence ‘Living In a Fool’s Paradise’” (1984); Lis Rhodes with Jo Davis, “Hang on a Minute / Swing Song” (1983); among others.
4 Cinenova distributes “Slides I-V” (1971) by Annabel Nicolson.
5 Felicity Sparrow, “Annabel Nicolson”, LUXONLINE, http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/annabel_nicolson/essay(2).html, accessed 3 April 2015.
6 Teresa de Lauretis, “Strategies of Coherence”, p. 109.
7 Sandra Lahire, “Plutonium Blonde” (1987) and “Uranium Hex” (1987).
8 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Signs (Spring 2003), p. 802.
9 Ibid., p. 803.
10 Teresa de Lauretis, “Strategies of Coherence”, p. 114.