Lorna Irvine find this combination of art and cinema 'occasionally unsatisfying' but still worth a look.
Claude Cahun was an often overlooked French artist of the 1920s Surrealist movement whose work explored gender politics, reinvention and becoming 'the Other'. She escaped the Nazis and lived and worked with her lesbian partner, eventually settling in Jersey.
Sarah Pucill is a filmmaker who shares Cahun's aesthetic and thematic concerns, and this film examines these motifs through theatrical performance and the restaging of Cahun's photography with the text from her original book Aveneux non Avenus acting as a kind of narration.
Although often beautifully filmed, particularly in dream-like sequences true to the era where gendered iconography is being critiqued (Medusa, Narcissus, Cassandra) and shot through with a tender eroticism, as a cinematic experience it falls a little short, with shots which linger too long and too many literal interpretations.
Eyes and distorting mirrors are recurring symbols; the voices are double-tracked, giving a jarring effect, and the many performers, such as Rowena Lennon, Andro Andrex and Pucill herself, who play facets of Cahun's personality, are fine, but the problem in blurring art with cinema is an occasionally unsatisfying indulgence which could use a little editing.
Since art is subjective, and Pucill herself has said she did not intend a linear autobiography, it should be enough, yet the notion of the fragmented self within Cahun's art is only touched upon instead of given the proper exploration it deserves.
Still, this is well worth watching—in a gallery space or on DVD instead.
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