In her work, and particularly in her films from the 1980s, which are the focus of this essay, Lahire examined the many ways in which the female body is exposed, trapped and infiltrated by the colonizing forces of our technological and patriarchal culture. Despite the relatively small corpus of work that she left behind - she made ten 16mm films between 19 - Lahire expanded the boundaries of what feminist cinema could be by challenging established categories (in particular the separations between personal and documentary, narrative and non-narrative, the body and language), forging a singular film language that fused formal experimentation with socio-political commentary. Simultaneously, she started working in the context of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, an artist-led organization founded in 1966, which brought together the activities of film production, distribution and exhibition. Martins and the Royal College of Art in London where she studied with such ground-breaking filmmakers as Malcolm Le Grice, Lis Rhodes and Tina Keane. Like many of her contemporaries who started making films in the 1980s, she entered the world of experimental cinema through the recently established and truly innovative film and media departments at St. Sandra Lahire was one of Britain’s boldest and most important experimental feminist and queer filmmakers. It crystallizes some of the formal and thematic concerns at the core of Lahire’s films by expressing a sense of profound vulnerability through an image that evokes the intersection of the body with technology. “Overexposed, like an X-ray.” This line is borrowed from a poem by Sylvia Plath whose life and writings have had a considerable influence on Sandra Lahire’s oeuvre, even inspiring her final trilogy Living on Air (1991 to 1999).

Overexposed x ray