Dr Sarah Pucill

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.Photographs by Pucill that emerge out of and with her films were or are to be published in 2024, both with accompanying text.  The photograph ‘Untitled II’ from ‘Stages of Mourning’ (2002) appears in ‘Photography: A Queer History’ edited by Dr Flora Dunster and Dr Theo Gordon, published by Ilex Press Feb 2024.   Also in ‘Mirror Mirror – the reflective surface in Contemporary Art’, edited by Michael Petry, published by Thames and Hudson, Pucill’s photograph ‘Narcissus’ (2013) from her ‘Magic Mirror’ photo series appears.

A feature length review of Sarah Pucill’s recent film ‘Double Exposure’  (27min, 16mm +Digital) by Cambridge scholar Ciaran Hervas will appear in April's issue (2025) in MIRAJ magazine.  The film premiered at Frankfurt International Experimental Film Festival September 2023 and was featured as part of a focus on the films of both Pucill and Sandra Lahire alongside associated experimental films by women from UK which was curated as five screenings by Pucill.  ‘Double Exposure’ won Best Experimental Film at Toronto Women Film Festival and  screened at Danielle Arnaud in May 2024, with an Introduction and Q+A  with Helena Reckitt.  The film re-stages photographs (performed with b/w slide projections) made by Pucill and with the filmmaker Sandra Lahire who was her partner before she died in 2001.  Lahire’s piano playing, writing and performance to camera on Brighton beach accompany  the interior photo-performances.

Her previous film Eye Cut (16mm, 20’, 2021) premiered at London Film Festival and won best experimental film at Toronto Women Film Festival and at London New Wave Festival and showed at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art Dec 2022.  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.

Pucill made two feature length films that re-imagine photographs by Claude Cahun  alongside voices from her writing.  The first Magic Mirror (16mm, 75min, b/w, 2013), premiered at Tate Modern, screened at ICA, London Art Fair, Birkbeck Cinema, and toured internationally with LUX and was staged as an exhibition, “Magic Mirror: Claude Cahun and Sarah Pucill” at the Nunnery Gallery 2015 alongside Claude Cahun’s photographs.  In 2022 the film toured to Paris, Caen and Marseille in association with the play “Invisible Adventure” by Marcus Lindeen which includes clips from both films (also interviews with Pucill inspired the script), also screened at Washington Museum Gallery and the Lexi Cinema London 2022.

The second of a two-part study on the work of Cahun, 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.  A gallery staging of Confessions to the Mirror is touring in an exhibition of Cahun’s photographs, “Under the Skin” originally at Cobra Museum Gallery, Amstelveen, Oct 2019-March2020, at Kunsthal Museum Gallery, Rotterdam May-August 2022.  Both films are available as BluRay DVDs with essays in a booklet from LUX London.

A gallery installation, “Garden Self Portraits’ (2019) which included costumes and props from the film with shots from the Confessions to the Mirror reflected in water, were staged at Ottawa Art Gallery in the exhibition, “Face à Claude Cahun et Marcel Moore”.  Two chapters written by the artist on Pucill’s use of tableaux vivants in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror “ were published in Cinematic intermediality, (Ed M Schmid+K Knowles), 2021 and Experimental and Expanded Animation, (Ed N Hamlyn+V Smith) 2018.

In 2017 Phantom Rhapsody (16mm, bw, 20min, 2010) was staged in the gallery at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in one of the first exhibitions to include invited moving image artists, curated by Eileen Cooper (also invited Isaac Julien).  Phantom Rhapsody premiered at Sainsburies Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich in a programme curated by Ben Cook (LUX), was screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival, at Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts Superieure in Paris, the Millennium, New York.  It was part of the DVD compilation published by LUX  in 2011 and which launched at BFI Southbank and in the same year  was screened as part of Maya Deren’s 50th anniversary, in a retrospective of my films.  More recently in 2013, it was selected for ‘Assembly: A Survey of Recent Artists: Film and Video in Britain 2008-13 at Tate Britain.  Distinctive in its stark use of black and white, the film draws connections between canonical painting, early cinema and theatrical side-show ‘magic’ acts. The film examines the appearance and disappearance of the phantom as it relate

Sarah is an active member of CREAM. She is the recipient of 3 AHRC grants between 2002 and 2007 and of many grants from the Arts Council as all her 13 films to date have received public funding.

Her research interests are in experimental film and video, feminist art practice and theories, theories of art and film.

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.