'Double Exposure' 16mm+Digital, col+bw, 27min, 2023 premiere at the Frankfurt Experimental Film Festival
Pucill, S. 2023. 'Double Exposure' 16mm+Digital, col+bw, 27min, 2023 premiere at the Frankfurt Experimental Film Festival.
Pucill, S. 2023. 'Double Exposure' 16mm+Digital, col+bw, 27min, 2023 premiere at the Frankfurt Experimental Film Festival.
| Title | 'Double Exposure' 16mm+Digital, col+bw, 27min, 2023 premiere at the Frankfurt Experimental Film Festival |
|---|---|
| Creators | Pucill, S. |
| Description | The film premiered at Frankfurt Experimental Film Festival Sep 2023. The premiere screening was part of a curated screening programme of films made during 1990s by both myself and the filmmaker Sandra Lahire who appears in the film. The screening programme focussed also on the filmmakers that were contextual to British womens' 16mm experimental filmmaking in 1990s. The UK premiere of the film was at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London, December 2023, where I participated in a Q+A with the writer and curator Helena Reckitt. The film was awarded Best Experimental Film, Toronto Women Film Festival 2023. A feature-length review on the film by Cambridge scholar Ciaran Hervas will be published in MIRAJ Magazine April 2025 with some still images. Double Exposure re-stages photographs of Pucill and her once partner Sandra Lahire, shortly before Sandra’s death from anorexia in 2001. These black and white photographic images are projected onto an interior wall, where the filmmaker steps inside. Alone with the camera, the filmmaker blindly positions herself into a place that she cannot see, to re-play the image, to meet herself then and Sandra, who both keep getting younger. ‘Double Exposure’ is a space created between two time-frames, between two women and between material and light as odd objects from the projections are placed in position with their ‘light projection’ double eg a dress, shoe, mirror, table, chair etc. Inside this imagined intimacy that is also empty, the silence in the room is interrupted with street sounds from the world outside. The monochrome static camera and slow-paced performance of unbroken time that constitutes the body of the film, is bookended with colour 16mm film of a sunny beach, where colour emulsion bleeds between the sea, sky and sun and Sandra dances spontaneously whilst chatting and joking with the filmmaker who is present at that time, soon after, and 21 years after the death. Sandra’s piano playing ‘Prelude in E minor’ by Chopin accompanies her spinning dance and puppet performance on the beach. Lines from a text Sandra was writing at the time the photographs were made, are read over the images by the filmmaker that include quotations from the painter Georgio de Chirico and poet Sylvia Plath, reflecting on enigma, love, camera memory and a body that cannot be heard. Sarah Pucill |
| Keywords | experimental film, queer, time, anorexia, lesbian, feminist. |
| Year | 09 Sep 2023 |
| 2023 |