Above: The filmmaker Sandra Lahire from 1999; film still from ‘Double Exposure’ (2023)
b/w+Col (DCP) sound 28min
PREMIERE: exf f. – days of experimental cinema frankfurt
9. September 2023
Double Exposure re-stages photographs of Pucill and her once partner, filmmaker Sandra Lahire that were made collaboratively shortly before Lahire’s death from anorexia in 2001. Set inside an otherwise quiet studio, black and white interior scenarios are played out with picture frames, chairs, and a dining table, whilst street sounds from outside are heard as the filmmaker re- positions her body inside the celluloid projections of herself and Lahire. These inner walls of photographs from another time, are re-lived through posed living tableaux as if in stilled time. Still and moving merge also with out-takes from a film made soon after Lahire’s death. Contrasting this, the start and end, that bookend the film, show an open space of 16mm film that bleeds colour over a sea, sky and sun, as well as a half collapsed pier in Brighton from the 2001 fire. In a further layer, Pucill voices quotes from a text Lahire was writing at the time the photos were made. Quotes from the painter Georgio de Chirico’s and poet Sylvia Plath’s reflect on aesthetics, love, memory, camera and psyche and the politics of a feminist queer body.
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- Director, camera, sound:
- Sarah Pucill
- Appearing:
- Sandra Lahire (on beach) (1950-2001), Sarah Pucill in her studio
- Voice-over:
- Sarah Pucill
- Text:
- Quotes taken from Sandra Lahire’s incomplete PhD draft
- Photographs:
- Sarah Pucill (copyright) in collaboration with Sandra Lahire
- Piano:
- Sandra Lahire on London Filmmakers Co-Op piano (Chopin Prelude in E minor, Op 28 No 4)
- Colour grading and image correction:
- Fraser Watson
- Sound Mix:
- Robbie McKane
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[tab name=”Photos”]
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