Magic Mirror (2013)
By Sarah Pucill
‘An association is made between the hand-held mirror and a camera. Both close in on the face as make-up is applied; the camera beat, the click of the shutter, runs into the rhythm of the sentence, the full stop. And so the motion of the camera pan turns into that of a sentence. She [Cahun] plays with the grammar of the image, with the camera and the word.’– Sarah Pucill, Printed Project, issue 15, 2012, p.94Part essay, part film poem, Magic Mirror translates the startling force of Claude Cahun’s ouvre into a choreographed series of Vivantes Tableaux. Re-staging the French Surrealist’s black and white photographs with selected extracts from her book Aveux Non Avenus (Confessions Cut Off), 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 sh…
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