Sarah Pucill: Magic Mirror
Monday 22 April 2013, 18:30h
Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium
Bankside, London SE1 9TG

- Magic Mirror (Sarah Pucill, UK 2013, 16 mm transferred to digital video, 75 min)

This screening features the premiere of Sarah Pucill’s new film exploring the work of surrealist Claude Cahun.

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

The screening will be followed by a discussion between Sarah Pucill and writer, curator and artist David Campany.

Presented in association with LUX

Millennium Film Workshop Personal Cinema Series at The New School
Intimate Projections: Experimental Diary Films
Featuring: Barbara Hammer, Peter Hutton, and Amie Siegel
Wednesday, April 17 2013, 19h
Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street), New York
Admission: Free

The final program in a three-part series presenting personal visions of cinema’s potential as an artistic medium, “Intimate Projections,” features three internationally exhibited filmmakers whose meditative, insightful, and critical engagements with the diary form speak volumes about the aesthetic, political, and historical dimensions of this cinematic mode. From Peter Hutton’s lyrical reverie in the day-to-day to the charged, poetic feminism of Barbara Hammer’s Psychosynthesis Trilogy to Amy Siegel’s examinations of performed and projected identities in appropriated Youtube videos, the works presented in this program explore the vast reach of the diaristic gesture. The screening will be introduced by Howard Guttenplan and followed by a discussion with the artists.

Presented by the Millennium Film Workshop in partnership with The School of Media Studies and The New School for Public Engagement. The Millennium Film Workshop is a non-profit media arts center located on the Lower East Side. Since 1965 it has promoted the exhibition, production and study of avant-garde and alternative film, video and media art.

HASENHERZ N° 10: Rose Lowder
Saturday, April 13 2013, 11h
Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten
Mariahilferplatz 3, 8020 Graz, Austria

Born in 1941, french experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder is considered as one of the most influential European figures in experimental film. Starting as a painter and sculptor, studies took her to Lima and London. After many years of work as an editor at the BBC she intensely turned towards experimental filmmaking in 1976. In 1987 she presented some of her work as her thesis The experimental film as an instrument towards visual research. Along these lines she investigates her environment and its perception with a scientific view, using cinematographic tools.

In 2012 artists Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond start their series HASENHERZ. Imagine the format the following way: International artists are being shown. Duration: Approximately one hour. In the style of Schönberg's Association for private musical performance (founded in 1918) the concept of wanting to understand the new, is now transferred to the medium of experimental film and lyricism:The movies on display are being repeated and in between screenings they are discussed.The same form of presentation applies to readings. As it was the goal of the format`s model “to provide artists and art lovers with a real and profound knowledge of modern music“, similiar should be achieved for the experimental film/video and lyricism. If the artists whose work is being shown, are not present, they can be cut into the discussion via skype or telephone.