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Sarah Pucill’s films and photographs explore the mirroring and merging we seek in the Other; a sense of self. Her work is concerned with the idea that as subjects we are not separate where surfaces of inside and outside, animate and inanimate draw together. Focusing on the materiality of film and the body, her films probe unsettling worlds of mirror and surface.
For upcoming screenings and events see: http://www.sarahpucill.co.uk/news.php
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Phantom Rhapsody film still
Her most recent film Phantom Rhapsody (2010,16mm,bw) which is included in the recent DVD compilation of her films published by the Lux, was launched at BFI Southbank, screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Leeds Independent Film Festival, and a second time BFI Southbank as part of the Maya Deren Season and will be screened as a double screen version at Schwarz Gallery in a group show in January 2012.
Distinctive in its stark use of black and white and reminiscent of early silent cinema, this film is composed of a series of theatrical side-show ‘magic’ acts. Three women stage tricks of appearance and disappearance, punctuated by trumpet, cello and drums. Interchanging between the roles of magician, nude and filmmaker, they perform the preparation of an image and the prepared or completed image, drawing on iconic paintings. 16mm camera techniques as well as performance techniques with props - such as cloaks, drapery, curtains, wigs, mirrors, frames, wands and lighting – determine what is visible or absent in the film frame. With its surrealist sensibilities of artifice and reality and insistence on doubling and substitution, Phantom Rhapsody probes the notion of identity as surface that can be worn or shed and which can extend beyond the boundary of the skin, into the light in the room, the set and the props.
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Photograph 2011
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