In encountering Sarah Pucill's work, two impressions
remain in the imagination.
First, that in their formal quality her
films evoke a history of images in painting. Secondly, that there is a
relationship in her work to Surrealism. These impressions lead one to ask
what place her films have in the gallery, and within the traditions of
artists' film. But they also create ways of reading the films together, as
a sequence, to allow a view of their relationship to the audience and
their internal dynamics and complexities.
Pucill's work is more
complex than it at first appears. While her early films seem to inherit
the classical conventions of painting and photography, and at the same
time to critique them, it emerges through the later films that there is a
stronger dynamic in relation to Surrealism. Pucill herself qualifies this
link. But it can be seen in her use of a key surrealist principle, as
understood from the Manifestoes of Andre Breton: the disruption of
rational values in order to access the power of the unconscious in
image-making. Pucill enacts this in all her films as part of her enquiry
into the construction of images at a psychic level; and the disruption
Surrealism advocates allows her to access and animate figures of
thought.
Starting with a still image, Pucill's first films explore the legacies
of traditional still-life painting and related images in photography. The
formal values of both classical and modernist still-life composition
underpin an exploration of female self-portraiture and a meditation on the
use of woman as image. This is at the same time an exploration of
stillness and movement, of the monochrome image and of colour, and of
silence and speech. In her first film You Be Mother (1990) Pucill's
projected, still self-image is superimposed upon a subtly-rendered, grainy
and beautifully framed and lit composition of objects in a table setting.
Movements of slight but overt animation bring the two aspects of the
combined image together; and the addition of sound suggests moments of
psychic as well as physical disturbance, or of thought.
