MASTERCLASS

Magic Mirror combines a re-staging of the French Surrealist artist Claude Cahun's black and white photographs with selected extracts from her book "Aveux non avenus" (1930, Confessions Denied). In Surrealist kaleidoscopic fashion, the film creates a weave between image and word, exploring the links between Cahun's photographs and writing, as well as between those of the films of Sarah Pucill, as both artists share a similar iconography and concerns. Cahun's multi-subjectivity as expressed in both her book and photographs set the scene for the film, where she dresses and makes her face up in so many different ways, swapping identities between gender, age and the inanimate.

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 incorporates Cahun's early and later life and work including her political propaganda activity and imprisonment on Jersey with her partner Suzanne Malherbe during the Nazi occupation of the island. The tracing of a life is made conscious through the projection of images of the couple's home in Jersey into a domestic London setting.

Ritualized through performance to camera, Stages of Mourning is Pucill's journey of bereavement. In as much as this is a meditation on coming to terms with loss, the film is an exploration of how our relationship with the dead is made different through film. The artist orders image fragments of her late lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire. By trying to physically immerse herself into photographs and film footage or by restaging these, Pucill forms a continuous stream of a life of two lovers. Through this doubling and layering, illusions accumulate as if these were a product of a machine that does not stop.

You Be Mother uses stop-frame animation to disrupt the traditional orders of the animate and inanimate, the fluid and the solid. An hallucinatory space is set up when a frozen image of the artist's face is projected onto weighty pieces of crockery atop a table. Ears, eyes, nose and mouth, all become spatially dislocated as a determined hand begins to reposition, decant and mix. Events unfold to the amplified sounds of grinding, pouring and stirring.