Project framework: context, research questions, summary of research insights
Confessions to the Mirror (2016) continues my long-term research on the photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894–1954), whose radical surrealist work and life I explore by mixing Cahun’s language (words and photographs) with my own living tableaux vivants in film. I use this intermedial mixing of authorship to move film biography beyond traditional documentary practice, so providing direct access to both the work of an early artist and that of a contemporary one.
My film explores Cahun’s life on the island of Jersey, together with that of her partner and collaborator Marcel Moore, particularly during the Nazi occupation, using Cahun’s posthumously published memoir Confidences au Miroir (1945–54), and the photographs Cahun and Moore made on the island. The written script in the film is an abridged version from the original and is the first English translation of the French text.
Based on a close reading of this writing, my film presents a series of tableaux vivants, restaging Cahun’s photographs together with living illustrations of her text. In addition, I devised the sets and costumes to articulate a material presence that speaks of a cross materiality, where celluloid and digital, stillness and movement, black and white and colour are points of intersection in an indeterminate narrative
Context
As I describe in my article ‘Coming to Life’ (2018), both Confessions to the Mirror (2016) and its predecessor Magic Mirror (2013) – which was based on her 1930 manuscript/book Aveux non avenus and dealt with Cahun and Moore’s life before Jersey – were significantly influenced by two films I saw together, introduced by their makers: Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) and Sandra Lahire’s Lady Lazarus (1991). Both film-makers, to use Lahire’s expression, “collaborate with a dead artist” (Sylvia Plath in the case of Lahire, Langston Hughes in the case of Julien).
The use of the word “dead” next to “artist” creates a space to consider what dead or alive means in relation to an artist’s archive. Lahire animated her own rhythms of light and sound to dance with Plath’s voice reading her poems, stitching together her own optically printed superimposition with Plath’s writing. In a similar way “my” films on Cahun intertwine Cahun’s (and Moore’s) photographs with Cahun’s words.
In Julien’s beautifully staged film, black and white gay men embrace in frozen tableaux vivants, while a camera moves around puncturing the illusion of two dimensions. The methodology of Julien’s film inspired me because it provided a way both to research and to collaborate with an earlier artist without the constraint of a documentary approach. The idea of making Cahun come alive again in a new time period, through reactivation and remaking, was to become the core of my films. In this respect my films differ from others on Cahun, such as Lizzie Thynne’s Playing a Part (2004) and Barbara Hammer’s Lover Other (2006), which have included tableau vivant restagings but retain a documentary form. In contrast, my work seeks to build on (rather than simply illustrate) what is available through literature on the artist.
Confessions to the Mirror is based on extensive knowledge of Cahun’s work and a close reading of Cahun’s text, Confidences au Miroir. The structure consists of tableux vivants that restage Cahun’s photographs alongside visualised stagings from her text. These tableaux speak to a history of my own filmmaking practice as well as speaking directly to Cahun’s text.
Key questions
1 How can practice-based research methods throw new light on the oeuvre of Claude Cahun, with particular regard to the connections between Cahun’s photographs and writing and work with Moore?
2 How does the methodology of restaging tableaux vivants from a historic artist bring new insights into art-historical research?
3 To what extent can tableaux vivants provide insights into the intermedial space between photography and film?
Summary of research insights
In its particular use of tableaux vivants, Confessions to the Mirror provides a methodology to bring together the written text and still images of a historic artist, while at the same time bringing what is historical into the present through a material reinvention.
