Blind Light, 2007

2007, 16mm, col, 22min

Blind Light is filmed in the artist’s London loft. The presence of camera, studio and artist/performer are registered through image and sound, the loss of the former filling out the presence of the latter. In this way the physicality of object, space and subject as well as their inferiority is fleshed out, mapping out a space that is at once material and psychical. Controlling the light she allows into the frame, the artist lifts the blinds or pulls them shut, applies or removes lens filters, opens wide the aperture or closes it. Each performance or action threatens the image as it shifts in and out of ‘proper’ exposure until it disappears completely. Focusing either on the window or the sky, the artist narrates her camera operation whilst also describing what she sees; intermixing receptive and projective vision. ‘I can’t look’, she says, ‘the clouds are coming in’, ‘there’s been no rain for weeks’, ‘the eye burns, swells, looses focus and disappears in a stream’. Between aperture, eyeball, sun and moon, source and projection swap place. The film journeys from the grounded reality of the here and now – audibly represented through footsteps, birds and traffic, to a psychical space expressed through voice and abstraction. Blind Light explores the fold between the materiality of film, the psyche and the body.

Directed and produced:
Sarah Pucill
Funded:
Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Council of England
Camera, text and Edit:
Sarah Pucill
Performance:
Sarah Pucill
Sound, mix and dub:
Konrad Welz
Editing assistance:
Sue Giovanni, Lucia King
2007
Millennium Film, New York (retrospective)
The Old Lumiere Cinema (University of Westminster), London
2008
The Star and Shadow, Newcastle (retrospective), UK
European Media Art Festival Osnabruck, Germany
Trauma and the Sublime conference Swansea University, Whales
Louise T Blouin Gallery, London
Aurora Media Art Festival, Norwich, UK
Sway Gallery Open Show, Sway, New Forest, UK
2009
LightCone, Paris,
Anthology Film Archives, New York
2010
Film Without Film, Tate Modern, London curated by no-w-here and Maxa Zoller
Ruffled Galaxies – Infernoesque, exhibition, Berlin
LoBe Art, Berlin, curated by Olivia Reynolds.
2011
Moving Image South, Curzon Cinema, retrospective
2012.     Milton Keynes Gallery, Screening
2017         ‘The Artist Studio’ Programme of films, Vancouvre, Curated by Michele Smith,   DIM Cinema, The Cinemateque, Vancouvre, Canada