Online screening and discussion to mark the publication of a LUX limited edition Blu-ray release of Sarah Pucill’s acclaimed artists’ feature film Confessions To The Mirror (2016)
The recorded discussion is available to watch below.
Amidst a visual extravaganza of costumes and hand-made sets, Sarah Pucill’s film Confessions To The Mirror takes its title from the French Surrealist artist, Claude Cahun’s (1894-1954) incomplete memoir (Confidences au miroir, 1945-1954). Following Cahun’s text, the film includes Cahun’s early and later life and work including her political propaganda activity and imprisonment in Jersey with her partner Suzanne Malherbe during the Nazi occupation of the island. The tracing of life is made conscious through the projection of images of the couples home in Jersey into a domestic London setting.
As a sequel to Pucill’s previous film, Magic Mirror (2013), Confessions To The Mirror continues Pucill’s experiment to bring cinematic life to the photographic and written archive of Claude Cahun. In her new film Pucill animates re-stagings of Cahun’s black and white self-portrait and still-life photographs with voices from Cahun’s text Confidences au miroir, thus collaging and transposing Cahun’s black and white stills and words, into colour and soundscape.
“In Confessions to the Mirror Sarah Pucill continues her mesmerizing conversation with Claude Cahun, which began in her film Magic Mirror (2013). Inspired by Cahun’s photographs, Pucill composes prodigious tableau vivants that she interweaves with Cahun’s writing, upon which a multi-vocal filmic space is created. Out of this, she offers not only a poetic and personal reading of Cahun’s work, but her extraordinary aesthetic provides a space where Cahun’s voice-vision lives on through and with Pucill’s eye.”
Dr Katja Gorska, author, L’Objet garde et livre son secret. Claude Cahun’s Poetry of the Object (2020, transcript Verlag).
A screening of the film will be followed by a discussion between Sarah Pucill with Laura Guy and Maxa Zoller who have contributed new texts to the publication and chaired by Lucy Reynolds.
The event will take place on Vimeo and registrants will be sent the link 24 hours before. Captions will be available for the film, with ai captions for the discussion.
The Blu Ray is available now from the LUX online shop
Sarah Pucill has been making 16mm experimental films for three decades that have been shown and won awards at festivals, in museums, galleries and cinemas internationally. Magic Mirror (75min, 2013) premiered at Tate Modern, toured internationally and was staged as an exhibition with Claude Cahun’s photographs at the Nunnery Gallery, London and at Coreana Museum Gallery, in Seoul. The sister film to Magic Mirror, Confessions to the Mirror (68min, 2016) premiered at London Film Festival, and showed at international film festivals (Alchemy, Creteil, Dortmund) and museum galleries including National Portrait Gallery, White Cube Bermondsey, Cobra Museum Gallery, Netherlands and as an installation at Ottawa Art Gallery, Canada due to tour. A chapter on the film has been written by Sarah Pucill in Experimental and Expanded Animation (Palgrave Univ Press) 2019 and Cinematic Intermedialities (Edinburgh Univ Press) 2021. Sarah Pucill lives and works in London, has a doctorate and is Reader at University of Westminster. Her work is archived and distributed through BFI, LUX London and Light Cone, Paris. http://www.sarahpucill.co.uk
Laura Guy‘s writing on queer feminist art and culture has been published across various platforms including Frieze, MIRAJ: Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Women: A Cultural Review, Aperture and Photoworks.
Maxa Zoller is the Artistic Director of the Dortmund | Cologne International Women’s Film Festival, one of the world’s oldest and largest women film festivals. Maxa received her Ph.D. from Birkbeck College in 2007. Her interest in the interrelationship between art and cinema has marked her academic career at the American University in Cairo, Goldsmiths College and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. It has also informed her curatorial work for Tate Modern, no.w.here, Art Basel and the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, where she co-curated a major solo exhibition of Anthony McCall in 2014. Her understanding of ‚expanded cinema‘ also informs her work as director of the Dortmund | Köln IWFF, where she initiated artist residencies and book publications.
Lucy Reynolds is a writer, artist and academic examining questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective practice through her writing, curating and art projects.
Her articles have appeared in a range of journals such as Afterall, Screen, Screendance, Art Agenda and Millennium Film Journal, and she has curated exhibitions and film programmes for a range of institutions nationally and internationally, from Tate and MUHKA, Antwerp to the ICA and the South London Gallery. She has contributed chapters to publications on moving image histories including David Curtis, Duncan White (eds) The Expanded Cinema Book, Afterall/Tate publications, 2010; Bridget Crone (ed) The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, Picture This publications, Bristol, 2012 (2nd ed 2018); London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks, 1960-1980 (eds. Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer, Amy Tobin), Penn State University Press, 2018 and Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (eds. Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey), IB Tauris, July 2017.
As an artist, her films and installations have been presented in galleries and cinemas internationally, and her ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus has been heard at the Glasgow International Festival, the Wysing Arts Centre, the Showroom and The Grand Action cinema, Paris. She is editor of the anthology Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, co-editor of Artists Moving Image in Britain since 1989. She is co-editor of the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ).
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