Confessions to the Mirror

Confessions to the Mirror

Sarah Pucill

GB
2016
Experimental
68’
Focus

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

Director / Script / Cinematography / Editing

Sarah Pucill

Sound Design

Mairead McClean

Cast

Karen Leroy-Harris, Kate Hart

Production

Arts Council of England

Contact

LUX

Sarah Pucill

Sarah Pucill attended the Slade School of Fine Art at the University College London from 1988-1990. Here she earned her master‘s degree. She is a reader at the University of Westminster since 2000. Central to her work is »a concern with mortality and the materiality of the filmmaking process«. In 2014 she earned her PhD with her publication Mourning, materiality and the feminine. In addition, since 2005, Pucill works as external examiner of doctoral degrees in art at the University of East London. The majority of her films take place within the confinements of domestic space, where the grounded reality of the house itself becomes a portal to a complex and multi-layered psychical realm. Pucill lives and works in London.


Films by Sarah Pucill
Magic Mirror 2013 | Phantom Rhapsody 2010 | Fall in Frame 2009 | Blind Light 2007 | Taking My Skin 2006 | Stages Of Mourning 2004 | Cast 2000 | Swollen Stigma 1998 | Mirrored Measure 1996 | Backcomb 1995 | Milk and Glass 1993 | You Be Mother 199