Eruption, rupture, suture and disruption by Sarah Pucill
In a video of Sandra talking to camera which she asked me to record in my flat, she discussed some ideas she wanted to explore for her PhD,1 her plans for the thesis were to explore the place of visual art and Surrealism in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. The PhD, which she sadly was unable to complete, would also examine the work of some women artist filmmakers in relation to the feminine and the lesbian. Sandra’s own films, which embrace these themes, would be part of this. I quote: The idea of eruption is a volcano, a breaking in the boundary of skin, or the Earth, the root of the word is rupture. I have these notes: eruption, rupture, suture and disruption, all of which apply to the way that images emerge in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the films of Sarah Pucill who has the same initials as Sylvia Plath. Eruption is part of the film as poem, where events unfold without verbal commentary. The film as text becomes the camera speaking, if it is done purely with visuals. And if it is done with sound it becomes a dialectic between sound and silence, where the spaces are occupied rhythmically by the silences in relation to the image which is perceived by the seeing eye. The fractured subjective eye, the psychic ”I” experiences a dialectic, a lively interchange back and forth between the sound, the silence and the visual which perhaps only hieroglyphics as a verbal language have been able to do.
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Eruption, rupture, suture and disruption apply very much to the language of Sandra’s films, which are tightly woven, produced frame by frame as a film poetry of montage. The “camera speaking” resonates with Sandra’s mode of filmmaking, often a hand-held camera. Michael O’Pray described her films having a “with gloves off approach.” Her camera was part of her body. An open mouth to capture what is in front of it, the vital moment. Her method was impulsive; she calculated the aperture reading not from a light meter, but from the position of the sun in the sky, the status of clouds and time of year. She knew what she needed to film for the edit, and what she wanted to overlay or juxtapose it with. She worked with certainties: The plan decided in advance. Her film language incorporated much super-imposition in frame which she did either as an “in camera” process on 16mm film, only possible on a Bolex camera or in post production on an optical printer. She was especially skilled at both. The former (she taught me) involves shooting, re-winding and shooting again. With the optical printer, she was able to overlay still images (35mm slide transparency) with 16mm footage or Super 8 footage. This method is calculated frame by frame (24 frames of each second of film) where each frame of film is sutured to either another film frame or a still image. Sandra’s use of the word hieroglyphic speaks, to the frame by frame construction method that her work with the optical printer entailed. She used the word “stitch” to describe the way in which Plath’s voice is incorporated into her films. A frame by frame embodiment of her voice per syllable to Sandra’s layering of images and sound. Forming a tapestry of word, light and sound, of embedded combinations, forcing a fusion between the two art forms (literature and filmmaking), each frame a hieroglyphic shape as an intermedial signifier between word and image, light and sound. This entails also a co-authorship between artists alive at different times, yet sutured across time, enforcing a “speaking” of Plath’s voice inside Lahire’s camera.
Sandra was studying at Queen Mary University with Jacqueline Rose and sadly died before completing it.
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Living on air
