Sarah Pucill
Magic Mirror
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format 16mm
Year 2013
Language(s) English
Artist(s) Sarah Pucill
Running time 75 min
Films
MAGIC MIRROR (2013) 75'
Description
Sarah Pucill has been making 16mm films since completing her MA at the Slade in 1990. Since then, her films—all funded by public grants—have been screened and awarded at international festivals, and presented in museums and galleries. Her retrospectives have taken place notably at Tate Britain, BFI Southbank, Anthology Film Archives (New York), Pleasure Dome (Toronto), École des Beaux-Arts and LA FilmForum. Shot in black and white 16mm, Magic Mirror (2013) premiered at Tate Modern, then screened at the ICA and London Art Fair. She is currently preparing a sequel to Magic Mirror. She lives and works in London, and is an associate professor in fine arts at the University of Westminster.
Both essay and visual poem, Sarah Pucill's film Magic Mirror transposes the striking force of Claude Cahun's work into a choreographed series of tableaux vivants. Recreating the French surrealist's black and white photographs from selected excerpts of her book Aveux non avenus, the film explores the connections between Cahun's images and writings. Claude Cahun's multi-subjectivity, expressed both in her photographs and in her work, serves as the film's framework where she disguises and makes herself up in multiple ways, exchanging identity between genders, ages and inanimate objects. Three women embody Cahun's characters; often, it is difficult to distinguish them. This fragmentation of identity manifests as a double, persisting throughout the film: literal double through superimposition, shadow, imprint in the sand, reflection in water, mirror or distorting glass. Similarly, the voice splits between various registers and guises; sometimes they overlap, sometimes they dialogue. The kaleidoscopic aesthetic running through the film weaves not only a link between image and speech, but also between Cahun's work and Sarah Pucill's films, creating a dialogue between two artists sharing similar iconography and concerns.