With Confessions to the Mirror, the experimental cinematic art of British artist Sarah Pucill reaches a new highpoint. Pucill dedicates herself with poetic clarity to the great Dadaist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), whose life on Jersey, the small island in the English Channel, during the Second World War is portrayed here as a surreal and fragmented experience. Following on from Pucill‘s first film about Cahun, Magic Mirror (2013), in Confessions to the Mirror she reworks not only Cahun‘s black-and-white self-portrait and still-life photographs, but also her texts. The film’s title for example comes from Cahun’s memoires, Confidences au miroir, which she wrote from 1945 right up until her death. In the film, the mirror becomes the dominant metaphor, achieved through Pucill’s finely crafted use of make-up, costume design and space. Pucill has been working with analogue film for over 30 years. Her artistic approach is inspired by the structural film of the London Film Cooperative, and draws on surrealism, collage and feminist experimental film. How can I use technology and light to produce something on screen on a pictorial level? In Confessions to the Mirror, the artist explores this question to the fullest and gives us a baroque visual experience that has become a rarity in our digital age. (MZ)

Film Series Fake Space