Eye Cut

Sarah Pucill’s recent film Eye Cut (16mm, 20’, 2021) premiered at London Film Festival to a packed cinema audience and will be screened at Jeu de Paume in November as part of the Retrospective on Vivienne Dick. Eye Cut returns Pucill’s practice back to the film language of her early Surrealist interior sets and objects, where echoes of her first film You be Mother (1990) are revisited.

Sarah Pucill’s publicly funded films have been shown in galleries and won awards at Festivals internationally. 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. In her explorations of the animate and inanimate, her work probes a journey between mirror and surface, in which questions of representation are negotiated. At the heart of much of the work is a concern with the image as a still, whether literally or symbolically. Relationships between self and other turn into a concern of relationships between women, mostly mother or lover.

Pucill made two sister films that re-imagine photographs by Claude Cahun alongside voices from her writing. Both films screened at White Cube as part of “Dreamers Awake”, August 2017. The first feature length film Magic Mirror (16mm, 75min, b/w, 2013), premiered at Tate Modern, screened at ICA, London Art Fair, Birkbeck Cinema, and toured internationally with LUX. A LUX DVD was published Autumn 2014. The film was staged as an exhibition, “Magic Mirror: Claude Cahun and Sarah Pucill” at the Nunnery Gallery May and June 2015 alongside photographs by Claude Cahun and from the film.
The second feature length film Confessions To The Mirror (16mm, col, 68min, 2016) premiered at the London Film Festival in October 2016 and in 2017 at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Creteil, Paris Intl Women’s Film Festival, Dortmund Intl Women’s Film Festival, Close Up Cinema and National Portrait Gallery, London. The film was staged in an exhibition on Claude Cahun at Cobra Museum, curated by Julia Steenhuisen, Amstelveen, 2019. Confessions To The Mirror is a sequel to Magic Mirror (16mm, b/w, 75min 2013). Where Magic Mirror is composed of extracts from Cahun’s major text Aveux non avenus (1930) and visually focusses on the self portrait photographs made in Paris during 20s and 30s, Confessions To The Mirror compiles extracts from Cahun’s posthumously published and to date un-translated text, Confidences au miroir (1945-52) and focuses on Cahun’s lesser known still life images and outdoor self-portraits in Jersey. The biographic and fragmented text narrates Cahun and Suzanne’s anti-Nazi propaganda activities in Jersey and their consequent imprisonment during the occupation of the island. Cahun’s artwork made in peacetime is set alongside the propaganda artwork the couple made and distributed to Nazi officers on the island. Cahun’s revealing of her domestic space at the edges of her photographs is echoed in the revealing of the domestic space where the filming took place, projecting film footage onto interior walls of Cahun and Suzanne’s home and garden in Jersey. At Ottawa Art Gallery In at Ottawa Art Gallery, a film installation from the film was staged that included props and costumes in “Face à Claude Cahun et Marcel Moore”.