Sarah Pucill: Magic Mirror
Monday 22 April 2013, 18:30h
Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
- Magic Mirror (Sarah Pucill, UK 2013, 16 mm transferred to digital video, 75 min)
This screening features the premiere of Sarah Pucill’s new film exploring the work of surrealist Claude Cahun.
Part essay, part film poem, Magic Mirror translates the startling force of Claude Cahun’s ouvre into a choreographed series of tableaux vivants. Re-staging the French Surrealist’s black and white photographs with selected extracts from her book Aveux Non Avenus (Confessions Untold), the film explores the links between Cahun’s photographs and writings.
Cahun’s multi-subjectivity, as expressed in both her photographs and book, set the scene for the film, where she dresses and makes her face up in many different ways, swapping identities between gender, age and the inanimate. Three women masquerade as Cahun’s characters: often it is hard to tell them apart. The splitting of identity appears as a double which persists throughout; as literal double through super imposition, as shadow, imprints in sand, reflections in water, mirror or distorting glass. Likewise, the voice is split between differently dressed voices, which at times overlap, and at times are in conversation. The kaleidoscope aesthetic that runs through the film serves not only to weave between image and word but also between the work of Cahun and the films of Sarah Pucill, creating a dialogue between two artists who share similar iconography and concerns.
The screening will be followed by a discussion between Sarah Pucill and writer, curator and artist David Campany.
Presented in association with LUX
Balagan presents... Breakwater
Tuesday, February 19 2013, 20h
Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA USA
From camera motion inspired by the fluidity of bubbling streams -- to the productive potential of organisms residing within -- to the symbolic significance of a teacup's or a storm's destructive powers -- water has given rise to some incredible cinematic images. With this small-gauge film program of works old and new, the first of 2013, we explore the form's aesthetic and figurative possibilities.
Balagan is an acclaimed screening series that hosts regular shows at the historic Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, Cambridge. It was started in 2000 by Jeff Silva and Alla Kovgan to make up for the absence of experimental programming in Boston. Since then, the series has showcased hundreds of works from unconventional artists working on the fringes of cinema. Some of the qualities that make Balagan unique are 1) a commitment to showing work in the intended format whenever possible, 2) efforts to bring artists in person, making for a more exciting interaction between artist and audience, 3) one-of-a-kind, screen-printed posters that we commission from local designers for each show.
Aesthetic Queeries
Part of the Open City Docs Fest
Saturday June 23, 17h
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH
This programme of short documentaries queers the aesthetics and forms of filmmaking as well as exploring and documenting queer lives, staged reality, psychological states and audience participation and reaction. From the cut-up techniques of Daniel McIntyre and Ruth Novaczek, the camp aesthetic of Kuchar’s documentary ode to his dog, the handmade DIY punk of two films from Pitbull Productions’ The Filmic Pleasure Trilogy, to the delicate formalism of Sarah Pucill’s meditation on grief, is there such thing as a queer aesthetic? Barbara Hammer thinks there is and a rare screening of Audience celebrates the 20th anniversary of this film in which Hammer turns her camera on her audience(s) chronicling three film and lesbian scenes at her screenings: politicised San Francisco, expressive Montreal and a more sombre London still finding its voice.
