Double Exposure

Double Exposure re-stages photographs of Pucill and her once partner, filmmaker Sandra Lahire that were made collaboratively shortly before Lahire’s death from anorexia in 2001. Set inside an otherwise quiet studio, street sounds from outside are heard as the filmmaker re- positions her body inside the photographic projections of herself and Lahire taken 22 years ago. Contrasting the opening and closing colour shots of the sea and Brighton pier that collapsed from a fire in 2001, queer black and white partly surrealist interior scenes are played out with picture frames, chairs, and a dining table. These ‘still’ images are collaged with earlier film footage made in response to Lahire’s sudden death. In a further layer, Pucill voices quotes from a text Lahire was writing before her death, which includes references to Sylvia Plath poetry and Georgio de Chirico’s painting. The film (following Lahire’s writing) reflects upon the unconscious, and memory in relation to the camera and psyche and feminist critique of the politics of the body as either exposed or protected.

Finally on a beach we watch with Pucill sat looking at a desk-top screen, within which her once collaborator dances to the camera, soon after her death and now. Lahire’s humour-filled puppet doll performance on the beach, accompanies the haunting presence of her piano playing. In the final shots of a space without time; sun, sky and sea waves, Lahire spins joyously in a yellow skirt on the beach as if to connect sky and land. The opening shots of Brighton pier that collapsed soon after Lahire’s death are re-visited at the end of the film with a 20 year time gap, faint and thinned over time.

Despite the close subject matter, the film follows a trajectory of filmmaking that Pucill adopted in her two long films, which collage together Cahun’s (re staged) photographs with her writing as voice over. The idea to ‘collaborate with a dead artist’ follows Sandra’s phrase in relation to her own films ‘with’ Sylvia Plath.