BFI Reuben Library, 25 February 2020
I am always struggling to decide what is essential watching and what I can afford to forego. I wish I could watch/read/listen to everything. And when I discover something truly illuminating (like the work of Lis Rhodes and instead of feeling reassured that I made the right choice I worry about everything else that I might be (probably definitely) missing. Carolyn Steedman writes about archival dust making researchers sick but in my case it is time, the lack of it, that gives me vertigo.
[At the same time, archives can be such a haven: wifi is often complicated and I give up; archivists are a special breed, kinder(?) or in any case simultaneously discreet and involved; low, soft(er) voices are used by both staff and users; you are allowed -- even expected to -- take your time; distraction looks like reflection and sometimes is and anyway, being truly distracted takes a lot of concentration. Exiting this archival oozy temporality feels difficult, especially when you're spat out into London commuter frenzy.]
HANG ON A MINUTE, a series of thirteen 1-minute films by Lis Rhodes and Jo Davis, produced by Four Corner Films and commissioned by Channel 4 were made to be 'transmitted unexpectedly in and around the WOMEN DIRECT series', as uncanny intervals/interruptions between other programmes. While the series matched the most radical aspirations of Channel 4 (e.g. according to the What's this Channel Fo(u)r?), it was never broadcast. The instalment 'Ironing to Greenham' is the only one referencing the peace camp explicitly but most speak to feminist protest and resistance showing it as an intersection of other causes, including housing and gendered violence.
The film starts with a menacing hiss revealed to be the sound of a hot iron on a piece of damp white embroidered cloth with a lace trim. Shots of sky and landscape are filtered through chain link fences, sometimes resembling lace in structure. The embroidery is revealed to be the following quotation by Hannah Arendt from her book On Violence:
‘Violence can always destroy power;
out of a barrel of a gun
grows the most effective command
resulting in the most instant and
perfect obedience.
What never can grown out of it is power.’
Images of the make-shift benders of peace camp women take over from the kerchief, alluding to another kind of resilient domesticity: dwellings that had to be reclaimed and built again and again after each eviction, and that were never recognised or respected as dwellings by the base, the authorities and some Newbury residents. The voiced over poem (by Lis Rhodes spoken by Lily Greenham) which in the end dissolves into fragments of different Greenham songs, suggests a counterintuitive change in consciousness and change of tactics while mobilising the iron metaphor:
‘The more she respected other opinions, the less she listened, the less she learnt. So then, she said, I put in my teeth. The more she respected her own experience the more she heard, the more she knew. The angrier she became, the calmer she was. The more outraged she seems, the surer she is that her words will emerge when the iron is hot.’
According to Luxonline, 'Lis Rhodes' poem dwells on the moments before a political thought is translated into a distinctive physical organisation such as the women who surrounded the Greenham missile base.' This special architecture is both animate and inanimate, human and non-human: the hissing iron and the carefully assembled benders reflect and support -- and are reflected in and supported by -- bodies standing in unison and dancing on the silos, women's circles that knowingly evoke the historic vilification of women's intimate sociality (witches circles), to draw strength from them and possibly also to avenge them.
As subsequent work by Lis Rhodes reinforces, filming and photographing protest can be a form of protest in its own right, especially but not only if the capturing of images is in itself declared a threat to law and order and criminalised.
What if Greenham Common were an engine of knowledge and solidarity (acknowledgement as the first step towards solidarity) rather than an object of research? An engine that endlessly (re)produces the British feminist 1980s, although its significance exceeds national borders, 'feminist' doesn't quite exhaust its multiple affiliations, and it lasted well beyond 1989; a web of interconnected images, artefacts, relics and recollections, growing rhizomatically into actual and potential alliances in the present and beyond, revived each time it is revisited. More on webs to come.
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