Sarah Pucill at the Freud Museum

Film screenings and discussion

Wednesday 21st April 2010 7pm

Sarah Pucill

Taking My Skin, 2006
16mm b&w, sound 35min
Fall in Frame, 2009
16mm b&w, sound 18min

The screening will be followed by discussion between Adriana Cerne and the filmmaker, chaired by Dr Margherita Sprio from University of Essex.

I’m not aware of you taking my skin’, says the artist’s mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. Taking My Skin tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process ‘in the moment’ to relations in an earlier time – ‘how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?’ Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Formally and thematically, the film is an exploration of closeness, of synching, and the threat this poses to the self.

Freudian themes will be explored in two of Sarah Pucill’s films using psychoanalytic tropes of Projection, Surface and Screen. Inspired by feminist post Freudian writing which has challenged the phallo-centrism in Freud, Pucill’s films give pride of place to the mother-daughter and 'other' female to female relationships. The films that will be screened and discussed include the award-winning Taking My Skin (35min, 2006) as well as her most recent film Fall In Frame, (18min, 2009).

Sarah Pucill’s films have been screened and won awards at major international film festivals, have been televised and screened internationally in galleries and museums. She lives and works in London and is a Senior Lecturer at University of Westminster.

Adriana Cerne is a Doctoral candidate at the University of Leeds, researching feminist counter-cinema films and filmmaking from the 1970s to the early 1980s, with a focus on the early work of Chantal Akerman. She contributed to the book Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, which forms part of Blackwell’s New Interventions in Art History series. She teaches Visual Culture and Theory at the University of the Arts London and at the Royal College of Art.

Dr Margherita Sprio is currently a lecturer in Art History and Film in the Department of Art History and Theory at University of Essex. She is currently writing a manuscript called Contemporary Art and Film that explores the continued relationship between art and film history and it addresses how film makers such as Sarah Pucill and John Maybury, (amongst others) navigate their own practice in relation to contemporary debates about visual culture.

Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.

Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk