Magic Mirror: a screening and Q&A with Sarah Pucill and Diarmuid Hester

Thu 13 June 2024

Murray Edwards College

The event will begin with a screening of Sarah Pucill’s experimental film Magic Mirror (16mm, b/w, 75 min, 2013), which collages together re-stagings of the French Surrealist artist Claude Cahun’s black and white photographs with selected extracts from Cahun’s 1930 book Aveux non avenus (Confessions Denied, or Disavowals). In Surrealist kaleidoscopic fashion, the film creates a weave between image and word, exploring the links between Cahun’s photographs and writing, as well as the thematic and iconographic concerns that connect Cahun’s work and Pucill’s films.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with the film’s creator, Sarah Pucill, and radical cultural historian and author Diarmuid Hester, who writes on Cahun in his recent book Nothing Ever Just Disappears (2023), chaired by History of Art PhD student Ciaran Hervás. The conversation will delve into the film's exploration of queer historical memory through the cross-temporal collaboration between Pucill and Cahun. We will discuss the role of the intermediate/intermedial in Pucill and Cahun’s work, examining what it means to move and exist between mediums, times, and identities. We will conclude by opening the conversation to the audience for questions, comments, and reflections on the screening and discussion. The event will be followed by a drinks reception.

Organiser: Ciaran Hervás, cbh34@cam.ac.uk.

Supported by lgbtQ+@cam and the Cambridge MaCA Seminar Series, convened by Dr. Lorna Dillon and Prof. Alyce Mahon.

Cost: Free