Sarah Pucill, Magic Mirror © the artist

Event information

The workshop will address the following questions: to what extent can film be considered a plastic art in the ascendance of photography, painting, architecture and sculpture? How does film incorporate the visual arts into its fabric and to what effect? How are static visual representations remediated and reframed in cinema?

Date: 30th of September 2016

Host: Corpus Christi College, The University of Cambridge

Website: www.corpus.cam.ac.uk

Videos: www.filmandarts-network.hss.ed.ac.uk/podcast/talks/film-a-plastic-art

Programme

Venue: McCrum Lecture Theatre, Benet Street

9.30 – Introduction Marion Schmid and Kim Knowles

9.45-11.00 – Keynote 1

Ágnes Pethő (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania), ‘Inflecting the Photo-Filmic, Incorporating the Arts: The Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema’

11.00-11.30 – Coffee

11.30-1.00 – Session 1

Martine Beugnet (University Paris 7), ‘Dream Screen: On Film, Blur and Absorption’
Lucy Reynolds (Central St Martins, University of the Arts), ‘The Artist as Filmmaker’: Modernisms, Schisms, Misunderstandings
Rebecca DeRoo (Rochester Institute of Technology), ‘Documenting and Displaying Widowhood: Agnès Varda’s Multimedia Exhibition L’île et elle’

1 – 2 – Lunch

2 – 3.00 – Practitioner’s Talk

Sarah Pucill (University of Westminster), ‘Collaborating with Claude Cahun: Between Interpretation and Creation’

3.00 – 4.15 – Keynote 2

Steven Jacobs (Ghent University): ‘Carving Cameras: Sculpture in Film’

4.15 – 4.30 – Coffee

4.30 – 5 – Roundtable Discussion

6 – 8 –  Public screening
Sarah Pucill, Magic Mirror, 2013, 75mins
Followed by Q&A

Part essay, part film poem, Magic Mirror translates the startling force of Claude Cahun’s oeuvre 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 Denied), 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.

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