Film Categories: art & artists

  • Resurrection

    “Resurrection,” a hand-processed Super 8 blow-up, uses direct animation techniques such as scratching, bleaching and painting onto the emulsion of the film, in order to invoke the awakening of the feminine.

  • Twirl Girl

    “Twirl Girl” is a study of circular motion. It incorporates hand processing, xerography, rotoscoping and found footage in order to transpose the image of a woman dancing in circular fashion.

  • Stages of Mourning

    Ritualised through performance to camera, “Stages of Mourning” is Pucill’s journey of bereavement. In as much as this is a meditation on coming to terms with loss, the film is an exploration of how our relationship with the dead is made different through film. The artist orders image fragments of her late lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire. By trying to physically immerse herself into photographs and film footage or by restaging these, Pucill forms a continuous stream of a life of two lovers. Through this doubling and layering, illusions accumulate as if these were a product of a machine that…

  • Cast

    “Cast” creates a claustrophobic and haunting space where people and things invade worlds in which they do not normally belong. Lifeless dolls are heaped inside drawers, dolled-up life size figures lie motionless on a windy beach at the water’s edge; a chair rocks in an empty room, a mirror reflects and observes, and a chest of drawers is caressed by the sea. The film has a dramatic sensibility that sets up a false promise of narrative. Its structure, instead, is akin to that of dreams where different scenic spaces collapse and the inanimate and animate interchange. Wide-angled perspectives, shifting points…

  • Swollen Stigma

    “Swollen Stigma” nourishes the fantasy of its protagonist’s inner life and proposes a lesbian imaginary which takes leap into risk and displacement. The film opens with an entranced seated woman working her fingers through a single strand of hair and proceeds to explore her lived imaginary in which desire and fear interlace. She re-visions different moments in time which are haunted by an absent lover. Like a playful fairy princess, this lover appears upside down in an armchair, hanging legs-down from the ceiling, playing dead on the floor, or eating roses; her body continuously permeates the woman’s reality. The film’s…

  • Mirrored Measure

    “Mirrored Measure” features two women separated by a generation. The older woman ceremoniously lays a table – she repeatedly spreads a cloth and smoothes it out. The table is set and glasses and jug filled with water. A balanced and controlled ritual follows in which the jug is passed round and water is repeatedly sipped. Water becomes the lens through which we see and the medium through which the protagonists connect. The sense of connectivity is abruptly severed when the first glass tumbles.

  • Backcomb

    In “Backcomb” the demonic is unleashed on domestic space. It takes the form of two of femininity’s mildest tokens, hair and embroidery, that serve here in the creation of a sexualised surrealist experience. Within the claustrophobic space of a table-lay, a forceful and erectile mass of hair comes alive and slithers across its surface. The hair probes into vessels and punches through the cloth till finally order overturns and all smashes to the ground.

  • Milk and Glass

    In this film an interior landscape is scrutinised, and an apparent rational calm is revealed as suffocating. “Milk and Glass” is an evocative journey from surface to interior – a black-coated mirror, the hollow of a bowl, a cavernous throat; a brush demarcates a line of lip on a flat surface, a mouth doubles up with the bowl and is virtually spoon-fed till it chokes.

  • You Be Mother

    “You Be Mother” uses stop-frame animation to disrupt the traditional orders of animate and inanimate, the fluid and the solid. An hallucinatory space is set up when a frozen image of the artist’s face is projected onto weighty pieces of crockery atop a table. Ears, eyes, nose and mouth, all become spatially dislocated as a determined hand begins to reposition, decant and mix. Events unfold to the amplified sounds of grinding, pouring and stirring.

  • Red Like Meat

    A husband’s fantasies about his wife are stimulated with a bizarre fashion magazine. Both amusing and disquieting, the photographs in this magazine are those of the highly acclaimed Canadian photographer Janieta Eyre.