Sisterless is a documentary film by Yäniyä Mikhalina. Instead of live dialogue, the film uses voiceover from the protagonist, Albina, which was compiled from 1.5 years of her recorded conversations with the filmmaker.
My contribution was to fully reconstruct the ambient soundscape for the film's entirety, while using subtle sonic alterations and amplifications of ambience and speech to animate Albina's inner world.
The project was both ethically and technically challenging. Together with Yäniyä, I sought to create a space of encounter between Albina and the viewer, which could simply situate and support her reflections, rather than dramatize them. Albina's story was complex, and is best articulated by the filmmaker herself:
The film attempts to present a psychic reality of Albina, a young Tatar woman in Russia who dreamed to become a psychoanalyst. Instead, she went through several episodes of psychosis and psychiatric hospitalizations herself, following the psychosis of her sister Almira [...] Sisterless is an unsentimental attempt to analyze the work of grief, a feminist commentary on the connection between sickness, the contemporary political condition, and the consequences of Post-Soviet displacement. The narration is based on conversations accumulated over 1.5 years and provides a sex- and class-conscious take on the psychiatric system in Russia, inter-generational traumas, embodied capitalism, and female ethics.
Albina had a delirious experience of guilt for major political events that returned after the completion of the film: several months after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Albina herself committed suicide.
Though Albina is absent, there was something of her power and direction in all corners of the film, and pervading the film's final stages of production. In trying to understand our enormous task, Yäniyä and I anchored ourselves on a passage from Kaja Silverman's 1988 publication "The acoustic mirror: the female voice in psychoanalysis and cinema":
“To permit a female character to be seen without being heard would be to activate the hermeneutic and cultural codes which define woman as "enigma," inaccessible to definitive male interpretation. To allow her to be heard without being seen would be even more dangerous, since it would disrupt the specular regime upon which dominant cinema relies; it would put her beyond the reach of the male gaze (which stands in here for the cultural "camera") and release her voice from the signifying obligations which that gaze enforces. It would liberate the female subject from the interrogation about her place, her time, and her desires which constantly resecures her. Finally, to disembody the female voice in this way would be to challenge every conception by means of which we have previously known woman within Hollywood film, since it is precisely as body that she is constructed there...” Silverman, pg. 173
“It is not surprising, then, that a number of feminist filmmakers have pursued a vocal itinerary which is the obverse [...]. Rather than forging closer connections between the female voice and the female body, Bette Gordon, Patricia Gruben, Yvonne Rainer, and Sally Potter have all experimented boldly with the female voice-off and voice-over, jettisoning synchronization, symmetry, and simultaneity in favor of dissonance and dislocation. Some of these filmmakers have devised ways of fracturing the diegesis so as to make it impossible to say whether a particular voice is "inside" or "outside," or have so multiplied and mismatched voices as to problematize their corporeal assignation. Others have assigned the female voice an invisible location within the fiction, or have detached it from the diegesis altogether.” Silverman, pg. 174