Last February, the English artist Tacita Dean flew to London from Berlin and, upon arriving at Heathrow Airport, called the manager of Soho Film Laboratory. She was on her way to assess the color in three 16-mm. films that she had sent there for printing. The manager had bad news: the lab, which had recently been taken over by an American conglomerate, was under orders, effective immediately, to stop handling such film. Dean intended to show the films at a major exhibition of her work that was scheduled to open in Vienna two weeks later, and she was planning another film, arguably her most important to date: an installation for the Turbine Hall, the colossal space at Tate Modern, the London museum. Soho Film was the last professional lab in the United Kingdom that printed 16-mm. film; since the advent of digital cameras, it has been less and less used commercially.
The manager decided to violate the new rules and print the films for the Vienna show, and Dean found a lab in Amsterdam that was willing to print her future work. But she was shaken. She wrote letters to Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese’s editor, and to Steven Spielberg (who has publicly declared his fidelity to celluloid), and drafted a petition of protest, which eventually was signed by more than five thousand people, to send to the owner of the American conglomerate. Dean also published an anguished article in the Guardian. “This news will devastate my working life, and that of many others,” she wrote. “My relationship to film begins at that moment of shooting, and ends in the moment of projection. Along the way, there are several stages of magical transformation that imbue the work with varying layers of intensity. This is why the film image is different from the digital image: it is not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics, but something deeper—something to do with poetry.”
Dean is a reluctant but determined activist. Some of her friends call her Formidable—the French word meaning both terrific and awe-inspiring. Her friend the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides says that the nickname suits her “unstoppable personality.” She came to Berlin eleven years ago, on a German-government fellowship, with her partner, Mathew Hale, who is also an artist. They traded a damp studio in King’s Cross, with a bathroom down the hall, for a large Art Nouveau apartment, with parquet floors and a library. (They now share the place with their six-year-old son, Rufus.) They stayed because rents were cheap, but also because Berlin was a city still awaiting realization, like a roll of undeveloped film.
“We were the vanguard,” Dean said when I met her, in August, at her studio, which is part of a former train depot, in the parking lot of the Hamburger Bahnhof museum. “I loved it here when it was unfixed and unfocussed.” She is forty-five and austerely handsome, with large eyes the color of coal and a wide, upturned mouth that often gives her a wry expression. She wears sneakers, black trousers, a wool cardigan with elbow patches—the indifferent wardrobe of someone who devotes her energy to looking rather than to being seen. She has an assistant, but mostly she works alone, at a cluttered desk in a glass-and-steel extension that juts over a loading dock and looks down on a patch of birches and weeds. She speaks with the same soft deliberation that distinguishes her art.
Dean is known primarily as a maker of films, but she studied drawing in art school, and her films resemble drawings or paintings. Not much happens. There is typically no narration or score, though often there is ambient sound. There is no fancy lighting or camerawork—no zooms or pans. (“I like things to happen within the frame,” she has said. “I prefer to wait for it.”) Dean’s camera, affixed to a tripod, gazes impassively at its subjects—decaying buildings; boats, lighthouses, and seascapes; and, lately, artists, among them Claes Oldenburg and Cy Twombly—for minutes on end. She is an anatomist of passing time.
Like her medium, the objects and the people in Dean’s films tend to be outmoded or aging, and her work has an elegiac tone. “All the things I am attracted to are just about to disappear,” she likes to say. This description presumably extends to the projector, whose pleasing, soporific whirr—when did you last hear one?—accompanies almost every installation. Dean’s pacing, too, is anachronistic. To watch “Banewl” (1999) is to endure sixty-three minutes of a sumptuous Cornish landscape. Holsteins low under a brooding sky; a breeze ruffles the grass. Only around the half-hour mark does it become apparent that a solar eclipse is under way. Three cows nestle in the foreground while, above them, the light gathers, then melts away, in a drama of extraordinary subtlety. The sequence lasts ten minutes, and even awaiting its arrival requires a kind of patience that viewers habituated to rapid stimulation might not have. Dean makes time crawl, and in doing so she arouses simultaneous feelings of boredom and awe. Reviewing “Banewl” and other works in a 2001 retrospective at Tate Britain, Adrian Searle, an art critic for the Guardian and an admirer of Dean’s work, grumbled, “Dean can eat your day. We are rarely asked to give any art so much time.”
Even so, Dean is among the most widely exhibited artists of her generation—a raucous cohort, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, with whom she has little in common. In 1998, she was a finalist for the Turner Prize. (She lost to the painter Chris Ofili, infamous for his use of varnished elephant dung in a portrait of the Virgin Mary.) At the time of her Tate Britain retrospective, Dean was just thirty-five, the youngest artist to have a solo show at the museum. Five years later, she won the Hugo Boss Prize and, with it, an exhibition at the Guggenheim. If Ryan Trecartin, the young American whose videos at P.S. 1 caused a sensation this summer, represents one pole of contemporary art filmmaking—loquacious, immoderate, bedazzling—Dean embodies the opposite extreme. In her work, reticence becomes sublime.
The Turbine Hall commission, however, required something less protractedly pensive. Every year since Tate Modern opened, in 2000, in a former power station on the Thames, an artist has been invited to conceive an installation for the cavernous hall. (The series is sponsored by Unilever, the consumer-goods company.) The space, which formerly housed electricity generators, is five stories high, and its floor is thirty-five thousand square feet. Dean sensed that the kind of films she had made wouldn’t work in the hall. The commission, she told me, “had to be spectacular. It had to be about artifice, or artificial in some way. Bringing the real world in wouldn’t work.”
Nor would 16-mm. “You can’t really blow up 16-mm. without losing some of the sharpness,” she explained. She decided to use 35-mm., a film gauge that is still common in Hollywood. It would help her create something large and ravishing.
Tate Modern receives five million visitors a year—more than any other museum of contemporary art—and few exhibitions are as publicly anticipated, and as eagerly dissected, as its Turbine Hall commission. Given free rein and a generous budget, artists have typically responded with a grandiosity commensurate with the space. The sculptor Anish Kapoor installed a forty-five-ton, red-vinyl-draped “trumpet” so large that it could not be viewed in its entirety from any angle. The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson fashioned a giant sun from hundreds of lamps and pumped mist into the hall, turning it into an amber-hued terrarium. The hall has been festooned with stainless-steel tubular slides that visitors could use, and filled with towering stacks of white boxes. The Colombian artist Doris Salcedo made a jagged crack across the entire floor. (A few people fell in.) And last year the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei covered the floor with a hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds, hand-painted by artisans in the city of Jingdezhen.
The Turbine Hall commissions have spawned similar series in New York, at the Park Avenue Armory, and in Paris, at the Grand Palais, but the impulse toward hugeness has also created unease. In 2006, the London Times worried that Tate Modern had vulgarized itself by offering visitors an annual “quick-fix fairground thrill,” and, three years later, in the Independent, the novelist Philip Hensher wrote, “Some artists can handle massiveness. But most can’t, and their technical failings are ruthlessly exposed by the larger scale.”
Ian McEwan’s recent comic novel “Solar” includes, as a minor character, a conceptual artist whose latest work, constructed for Tate Modern, is a gargantuan Monopoly board with dice two metres high and houses that viewers can enter. The work—“an indictment, it was supposed, of a money-obsessed culture”—is a media sensation. What’s less clear is whether it’s good art.
Dean’s work defies such pithy exegesis. Some critics, perhaps struggling to understand it, have resorted to treating her name as a skeleton key. (The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy: “Tacita, the tacit and the one who silences. . . . Tacita makes use of implicitness, of what must be understood without having really been articulated.”) This may not be as absurd as it sounds. “I’m very interested in the naming of things, and words, and being called Tacita, and silence,” Dean told me one afternoon at her studio, as we sat at a folding table on the loading dock, overlooking the patch of green. Half buried in the weeds was a delicate metal trellis: part of an abandoned art work by Eliasson, who rents the studio next door.
Dean’s father was a circuit judge who studied classics at Oxford, and he claimed that he had taken her name, the female version of Tacitus, from a Latin dictionary. “It’s not like she’s made her work the way it is because of her name,” Hale, her partner, told me. “But it fits.” Dean feels that she got off easy: her sister, who works in public relations, is Antigone, and her brother, an architect who has appeared on British television, is Ptolemy. “My grandfather was furious with my father for giving us these names,” Dean said. “He thought it would curse us for life.”
Dean’s grandfather Basil Dean established Ealing Studios, one of Britain’s first commercial movie producers. But she hardly knew him, and she wasn’t interested in film, anyway; she wanted to be an artist. She grew up in Kent, in a seventeenth-century house surrounded by rolling hills. Over the fierce disapproval of her parents, who wanted her to attend Oxford, she enrolled in art school, eventually completing a graduate degree at the Slade School, in London. She discovered that she drew best in series; she was no good at making a single image. One series depicted deformed feet: those of Lord Byron (who had a clubfoot), of a family friend named Boots (who was lame), of Oedipus (whose name means “swollen foot”). A professor remarked that her drawings resembled filmstrips and suggested that she turn them into animations. She did, and soon moved on to filming people. In 1991, on a trip to Prague, she shot footage in which a man in an empty classroom carefully prints, and then wipes away, several words, including ztráta—“loss”—on a blackboard. This exercise, a rather literal-minded meditation on disappearance, established the theme that would sustain her art.
The next year, when Dean was twenty-seven, she was selected to participate in the New Contemporaries show, a competitive annual exhibition for young art-school graduates. Dean’s entry included “The Story of Beard,” a surrealistic film featuring a riff, with a bearded nude, on Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.” She wore new shoes to the opening, and by the end of the evening she could hardly walk. She learned that she had rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that has got progressively worse. She has had surgery on one hand, and can no longer straighten her right arm. She had a knee replacement, in 2006, and walks with a pronounced limp.
In retrospect, her interest in deformed feet seems uncanny. “Some people say, ‘That was probably some sort of somatic knowledge that your unconscious mind knew and your conscious mind didn’t,’ ” she told me. The fixation with feet has persisted: in 2003, Dean made a film of Boots, a haunting, Molloy-like figure in a suit jacket, who recounts amorous memories while traversing, on two canes, an empty mansion.
By the time Dean was named a Turner Prize finalist, she was best known for several works relating to Donald Crowhurst, a British amateur sailor who disappeared while competing in an around-the-world yacht race, in 1968. Nautical coördinates transmitted over the radio suggested that he was winning, but he was actually hiding out in the South Atlantic, perpetrating a hoax. After months in isolation, he went crazy, and when his trimaran was found it was empty; he had apparently jumped overboard.
Dean was fascinated by Crowhurst’s “time-madness,” and by the capacity of the ocean, in its undifferentiated vastness, to undermine a person’s sense of time and place. “Disappearance at Sea” (1996), one of three films she made about the incident, takes place at dusk, largely inside the lantern room of a lighthouse. Dean’s camera gazes not out to sea but at the rotating lens, in which streaks of sun and sky are reflected. The film is abstract and hypnotic, suffused with a crepuscular beauty that has become a signature look. In an accompanying text, Dean notes that the lantern’s rotations help mark time in the darkness: “You decipher time in the gaps between the flashes. Without this cipher, there is no time.”
Dean frequently writes short narratives—she calls them “asides”—to accompany her films. Appearing in the exhibition catalogues, the texts stress coincidences and chance occurrences, and also contain personal anecdotes and obscure history, in a manner that recalls the prose of the German writer W. G. Sebald. Like Sebald, Dean has sometimes been accused of nostalgia. Though her work is rigorously observant of obsolescence, her interest is not in the glory of the past but in the moment of decline. “I’m not harping back to the old days in any way,” she said. “Everything I film is very much in the present tense.” A more typical weakness is an unrelieved prettiness that can verge on sentimentality.
Sebald died in a car accident, in 2001. “Everyone had their John Lennon moment, but, for me, when Sebald died it was truly shocking,” Dean said. In 2007, she made a film about a friend and translator of Sebald’s, the German-Jewish poet Michael Hamburger, who emigrated to England in 1933. It begins in Hamburger’s apple orchard, an idyll of drooping boughs and mottled fruit. The light is eerie, slightly green; the only sound is wind. When Hamburger appears onscreen, wizened but spry, he has the allegorical weight of a character in a Tarkovsky film. As he plucks and caresses his apples, holds forth on their differences, and, finally, reads aloud a poem evoking a rare variety that he grew from pips given to him by Ted Hughes, you begin to see the apples as allegories, too—mementos of a prewar past for which Hamburger is both emissary and caretaker. The film ends as it began, in Hamburger’s orchard, but, before it does, Dean aims her camera skyward and lingers, perhaps unnecessarily, on a rainbow.
Hamburger died eight months after the shoot; similarly, Boots, Cy Twombly, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham died shortly after Dean filmed them. “People can read all sorts of things into that,” she said, ruefully. “I kind of make things that just disappear.”
Dean was offered the Turbine Hall commission during a meeting at Tate Modern in September, 2010. Afterward, as she stood on a pedestrian passageway overlooking the hall, she had an idea about form. She shoots many of her films using an anamorphic lens, which doubles the width of the frame, allowing her to take in an expanse of sea, say, or a herd of cows, without having to pan. Because the images are squished onto film stock of standard width, a corrective lens must be used during projection to insure proper proportions. Struck by the verticality of the hall, Dean thought of making a film that flipped her double-wide format on its side. All she had to do was rotate her anamorphic lens ninety degrees—switching, in effect, from landscape mode to portrait mode. But the question remained: a portrait of what?
Dean warned curators at Tate Modern that she couldn’t touch the Turbine Hall commission until after her show in Vienna opened, in March. By then, surely, she would have a conceit for the film. But none came to her. “We were jokingly watching ‘8 ½,’ the Fellini film about the guy who has no idea but has everything around the idea,” Hale told me.
On the night of February 26th, Dean, anxious about her lack of a concept, woke in a panic in her Vienna hotel room. Her plea to save 16-mm. had appeared in the Guardian four days earlier, and she was unnerved by the reaction. Nearly a hundred readers had posted comments online, many expressing bafflement, even hostility. “Evolve or Die,” one wrote. “Would you give this amount of time to someone moaning about not being able to find a cobbler’s on the high street to mend some 50s brogues?”
Of course, the end of 16-mm. printing at Soho Film is part of a broader conversion from analog to digital technologies, affecting all forms of cultural expression, from books and music to art. But, while in some mediums the impact is immediately obvious—when David Hockney held his first exhibit of iPad paintings, in Paris last year, no one mistook them for oils—the differences between chemical and digital film are harder to discern, at least for the average moviegoer. Many Hollywood directors still use 35-mm. stock, which they like for its high resolution, but eventually their film is transferred to a digital format, often undergoing thousands of Photoshop-like tweaks. Movies are increasingly screened in a digital format, too. The National Association of Theatre Owners estimates that 35-mm. projectors will be gone from American cinemas by the end of 2013.
Museums may soon be among the few places the public is likely to encounter chemical film, although even there, apparently, you can’t count on it. In Artforum recently, the critic Amy Taubin, reviewing an exhibition of Andy Warhol films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, assailed the museum for showing “crude video transfers” that “lack the seductive visual qualities” of the original celluloid prints. Dean, on occasion, has gone even further, suggesting that digital formats represent an irremediable loss for art. “I should not eschew the digital world because it is, of course, a great enabler of immediacy, reproduction and convenience,” she wrote in an aside in 2007. “But for me, it just does not have the means to create poetry; it neither breathes nor wobbles, but tidies up our society, correcting it, and then leaves no trace.” This argument probably does not resonate with viewers who have marvelled at the digital videos of the artist Bill Viola—who has captured people underwater, in a state of submerged transcendence—or at the visual effects in movies like “Inception,” in which cities fold in on themselves, like pieces of origami. It seems more likely that analog and digital film, like oil and acrylic, or acoustic and electric guitar, fire different artists’ imaginations differently.
On March 18th, Dean, who was still without an idea for the Turbine Hall, met with curators at Tate Modern to discuss the catalogue that was to accompany the installation. She proposed that the book, which would normally document the work’s creation—“endless shots of people on lifts, pushing boxes,” she says—be instead a manifesto on behalf of film, in which artists and experts explained the differences between celluloid and digital, and why celluloid film must not be abandoned. The curators enthusiastically agreed.
Back in her studio, in search of inspiration, Dean hung up vintage postcards of stairs, towers, waterfalls, and film frames—all evoking verticality, the portrait format. In April, a friend suggested that she read “Mount Analogue,” an unfinished novel by the French Surrealist poet René Daumal, who died, of tuberculosis, in 1944. The book, a mystical allegory recounting the search for an elusive mountain said to link Heaven and Earth, has nothing to do with technology. But Dean was drawn to its questing tone. She hung another image on her wall, this one a collage: Mount Analogue, as a snow-spattered peak rising from the sea. To this picture, she added borders with sprocket holes. Mount Analogue became a filmstrip, and Dean realized that she had found the subject of her portrait: film itself. In a text message to Hale, she wrote, “I’m going to call it ‘FILM.’ ”
“FILM” is not Dean’s first film about film. In 2006, she shot a movie in a Kodak factory in eastern France—the last one in Europe to produce 16-mm. film stock. A few weeks after she visited, it closed for good. The film, “Kodak,” is characteristically exquisite. Inside the factory, the lights are low, presumably to protect its sensitive product, and Dean’s camera wanders through the gloaming, taking in the miles of ducts, gears, drums, and vats involved in transforming vast sheets of pale-pink plastic into the stuff of cinema. Light bounces off the intricate geometries of stainless steel, at one moment evoking Ellsworth Kelly’s angular compositions, at another László Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic sculptures. In the final sequence, the camera takes in the floor of a room strewn with debris. Amid clumps of dust and sprocket-hole chads are twisted bits of discarded film, like so many mangled corpses.
“FILM” would not be so gloomy. “It’s very important that it’s not nostalgic,” Dean said. “It’s got to be celebratory, euphoric, unhinged.” Nor would it be in any way digital. It would be filled with illusions, but old-fashioned ones, all produced using analog means. Dean is not a film buff, and so she turned to books to do research on the first special effects of cinema. She experimented with hand-painting, a technique dating to the eighteen-nineties, but the effect was too mannered. She resolved to use tinting, a process in which black-and-white film is soaked in dye, acquiring a pastel lustre.
Dean learned about glass-matte painting, which was first used in Hollywood nearly a hundred years ago. Buildings or landscapes too expensive to create on a lot would be rendered on a piece of glass, then seamlessly integrated into a live-action shot. Emerald City, in “The Wizard of Oz,” appears first as a glass-matte painting, as does Tara, in “Gone with the Wind.” Dean also researched masking, in which a metal stencil is inserted behind the lens to change the shape of the frame. Early directors relied on masks to suggest binoculars, gun sights, and keyholes. Dean decided to use masking to create the illusion of a filmstrip, complete with sprocket holes.
The project was evolving as an elaborate experiment in form, but Dean still needed a backdrop—a theatrical set, if not a story, on which to stage her tricks. In May, she asked a photographer friend in London to take pictures of the Turbine Hall, which had just been emptied of Ai Weiwei’s “Sunflower Seeds.” She enlarged a photograph of the hall’s east end, a hulking wall comprising a grid of two vertical panels separated by rows of tall, narrow windows. This image, transferred to vinyl and lit from behind, would serve as a backdrop. Dean could superimpose other images onto it, using masks and glass-matte painting. She could also use masks and color filters to turn a section of the backdrop grid blue, say, while turning another section yellow. Masking would allow her to make a waterfall appear to flow through the windows, or a snail hover in front of them. Dean filled a notebook with colorful collages. “I suddenly realized that I should turn the Turbine Hall into a strip of film, using masking,” she told me. “This was the thing that was almost impossible to do.”
In a standard movie camera, advancing film presses tightly against the back of the aperture gate, a rectangular metal frame that determines the size of the exposure. In the past, masking had been achieved by placing a metal stencil in front of the aperture gate, an arrangement that left a gap between the film and the mask. As a result, the images were blurry around the edges—keyholes in soft focus. To create convincing sprocket holes and other delicate shapes, Dean needed precise borders. Any imprecision would be magnified when the film was projected, and Dean planned to project “FILM” on a white block more than forty feet high. The nearer the mask was to the film, the sharper the image would be.
Dean consulted friends who owned an architecture firm in Berlin, and they volunteered the services of Michael Bölling, a thirty-six-year-old architect on their staff. Bölling, a tall, courtly man with a trim beard, knew nothing about film but was adept at constructing elaborate miniature models of buildings. He suggested replacing the camera’s aperture gate with laser-cut metal stencils, thus eliminating the gap between the film and the masks. But the custom pieces proved too thick. Experts at Arri and Panavision, the two motion-picture companies from which Dean rented cameras, were skeptical. Bölling recalls, “At the first meetings, everyone said, ‘It’s absolutely impossible what you’re trying to do. You should go digital.’ Tacita would say, ‘There’s no way.’ ”
Dean and Bölling ultimately decided that their best hope for fashioning extremely thin masks was 3-D printing—a process in which a laser builds a custom-designed object out of liquid plastic, one layer at a time. In late June, after weeks of work, they produced a 3-D plastic mask that was less than a millimetre thick. “We were absolutely close to the film,” Bölling said. “Nobody had ever done this before.” Indeed, the feat would have been impossible until recently: the laser device that made Dean’s 3-D mask was a digital machine.
Dean scheduled her shoot, at a film studio near the Wannsee, for mid-July. By then, she and Bölling had made seventy-eight 3-D masks. Creating the sprockets alone required three masks. Every time one mask was removed from the camera and replaced by another, the film inside had to be rewound and reëxposed—a risky process prone to confusion and error. Rolls that captured each part of the Turbine Hall grid in a different color went through the camera ten times.
All the film needed to be “sprocketed” before other images could be shot, and Dean gave a camera assistant this task. Two other crew members travelled around Berlin with a camera and various 3-D masks, filming items from the outside world—a waterfall, a street clock, a pine tree, a smokestack—which would later be integrated with the Turbine Hall backdrop. A third team was assigned shots requiring color filters, and a fourth to capture other effects, including glass-matte paintings of lightning bolts, an enormous ostrich egg, and Mount Analogue. The shoot lasted nine days, and by the end the crew had used a hundred rolls of film. “It’s extraordinary how little went wrong, considering what a mindfuck it was,” Dean said. “The crew said their brains hurt.”
The shoot almost didn’t happen. On July 5th, Dean went to bed with a stomach ache. Two days later, she was given a diagnosis of acute gastrointestinal infection and hospitalized. Her doctors suspected a perforated bowel and recommended immediate surgery. “This was one week before my film shoot,” Dean recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t.’ They said, ‘You have to.’ ” In desperation, she called her obstetrician, who had become a friend. “He got me a second opinion, a doctor who came in and said, ‘You don’t have to do this now.’ ”
Even so, Dean stayed in the hospital for six days, receiving intravenous antibiotics. She arrived at the shoot still weak, subsisting on a diet of soup. The week I visited her studio, in August, her eyes were rimmed with fatigue, and walking had become a painful shuffle. For the first time in years, she wasn’t taking arthritis medication. A surgeon in London had told her that her intestinal problems were an effect of the steroid that she had been prescribed for a decade. She was reluctant to talk about her health. “If you make too much of an issue of it, people only see you through that lens,” she said. Her long workdays seemed an implicit rebuke to any such temptation.
One afternoon, she handed me a copy of a text that the actor Keanu Reeves had written for the catalogue. “It’s just brilliant,” she said, her eyes bright with pleasure. “I will miss walking on to a photochemical film set,” Reeves wrote. “It feels important and intense—uniquely. . . . In a way death is present in the rolling of that film—and so we live—right now—and the director says ‘Cut.’ . . . And that moment in time was captured—on film . . . really.”
It was after 6 P.M. when we sat down at Dean’s editing machine, a twelve-thousand-dollar 35-mm. Steenbeck, to look at some rushes. She had never used a 35-mm. machine; with its array of steel bobbins and spinning platters, it looked like a cross between an industrial sewing machine and a d.j. table. She loaded a reel, and the gridded wall of Turbine Hall appeared on the Steenbeck’s screen, twinkling like an animated Mondrian. “They didn’t make a mistake,” she said quietly. Every time a section of the grid changed color, there was a flicker of bright light. “That’s an exposure that happens when the mask is changed,” she explained. “Whenever you stop the camera, you get a flash of light. You could never get that with digital.” Dean saw no paradox in the fact that her masks owed their existence to digital technology. “It’s just a tool,” she said.
She threaded another reel into the machine. A large bubble floated across the screen, in front of the Turbine Hall backdrop. Inside the bubble, a second Turbine Hall glistened, like a scene in a snow globe. “It’s all an illusion,” Dean said, happily. “Film has always been artifice. That’s the whole point.”
Dean arrived in London on the evening of Thursday, October 5th, five days before the opening of “FILM.” The installation was not going as planned. A week earlier, a negative cutter at the lab in Amsterdam had made a mistake that caused distracting white stripes to appear during projection. After several futile attempts to patch the print, Dean realized that she had no choice but to recut the film. She had spent the first half of the week in Berlin, editing on the Steenbeck late into the night, and twice sending an assistant to Amsterdam in the morning with the section of film she had just completed. On Wednesday, Dean herself flew to Amsterdam and spent the night at the lab, working with a new negative cutter, from Kent, who had taken the Channel tunnel and driven on to Holland with his equipment in the back of his car.
It was not an ideal moment to be confronted with the frailties of analog filmmaking, and on Friday morning the mood at the Turbine Hall was tense. The hall’s skylights had been sealed with tarps, to keep out daylight, and the glass doors of the main entrance had been coated with light-reducing film. In the dimness at the other end of the hall, the enormous projection screen—Styrofoam blocks covered with a white vinyl membrane—glowed invitingly. Dean and Tate Modern’s staff referred to it as the Monolith, after the mysterious black slab in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which it eerily resembled. A hundred feet or so from the screen stood a row of benches, and, just behind them, in a plywood structure erected under the pedestrian passageway, was a projection booth. Inside it, Dean’s technical adviser, Ken Graham, had installed an endless-loop system imported from Germany. But the new print was still in Amsterdam, not yet finished.
Late that morning, Dean, Graham, a Tate Modern curator, and a press officer assembled over cups of Earl Grey at a table in the museum’s café, cell phones at their ears—an impromptu war room among oblivious tourists. “Every time someone phones me, I say, ‘What’s wrong?’ ” Dean said. Still, she seemed calmer than everyone else. She had lost weight, but didn’t look haggard, as she had in August. Editing the film had been more difficult than she expected. “You know, I’m the queen of the long shot,” she said. “I had to unlearn everything.” Recutting it had been even harder. She showed me a black notebook filled with images that she had been forced to replace or eliminate.
Everyone cheered up a bit in the afternoon, when the exhibition catalogues were delivered. On the cover was a closeup of a filmstrip, enlarged and bright red, spot-varnished so that it was as glossy as actual film, and so that dust would stick to it the way it would to actual film—an effect that Dean particularly liked. Inside were eighty-one contributions, alternately melancholic and defiant, from directors, artists, curators, novelists, the musician Neil Young, and Keanu Reeves. Some contributors had submitted film stills instead of words. Four had composed poems. (The artist Rodney Graham’s began, “I still prefer the cinema/For reasons that will/Be pretty obvious: Spools.”) There were a few practical observations. “For a long while almost everyone will continue to say ‘film’ when they are actually referring to something else,” Alexander Horwath, the director of the Austrian Film Museum, noted.
Jean-Luc Godard, following his usual practice, faxed a handwritten note: “The so-called ‘digital’ is not a mere technical medium, but a medium of thought. And when modern democracies turn technical thought into a separate domain, those modern democracies incline toward totalitarianism.” Tucked inside each catalogue were ten frames from “FILM,” so that, Dean explained, “everyone can hold a piece of film.”
Technical problems persisted through the weekend. The new print arrived at 2 A.M. on Saturday, and Graham spent eight hours that day loading it into the endless-loop system. At noon on Sunday, twenty members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, on tour in London, arrived at the Turbine Hall for a private screening. But the film was sticking to itself, as new prints sometimes do, and he was unable to project it. Dean, perched on a viewing bench, suggested that the dancers visit the museum and return later.
“The only person in the world I know who’s used this endless-loop system is Wolfgang, in Vienna,” Graham told Dean, after the dancers left.
“Get him on a plane,” she said, quietly.
Around 1 P.M., the Monolith suddenly lit up with an image of escalator steps descending between sprocket holes. Then three large red circles appeared, hovering over the moving steps. The scale and the motion of the image were arresting, but it was also a sly visual pun: a depiction of film advancing through a camera. A wrought-iron fountain appeared, followed by a rocky waterfall, sending water cascading down the screen. The middle third of the image reversed, and that portion of the waterfall flowed upward—a mischievous effect that undercut any sentimentality.
Some of the dancers had returned, and a hush descended as everyone gazed at Dean’s creation. The Monolith had been placed directly in front of the east wall, and when the Turbine Hall grid appeared onscreen it was as if the wall itself were pulsing with life. Triangles, circles, a grasshopper, red berries, a pink flower, a toe, Mount Analogue, a flickering light bulb, a smokestack—images succeeded one another on the grid, in richly colored syncopation. Light from the screen spilled onto the floor, giving the Monolith the aspect of an immense panel of stained glass in the apse of a cathedral. “FILM” was spectacular but not imposing, its silent procession of images odd and intimate. (After the opening, Adrian Searle, the Guardian critic, praised it as a “cool and passionate” rejoinder “to the digital noise of the modern world.”)
There was a lyrical shot of lake water at dusk viewed through trembling leaves, an allusion, perhaps, to Dean’s previous films. There were elegant glass-matte lightning bolts, an orange sun (an homage to Eliasson’s Turbine Hall project), and a witty sequence in which four eggs—bubbles filled with dry ice—tumbled slowly, one after the other, into a sea of foam. A red mountain peak evoked the old Paramount Pictures logo.
But “FILM” never felt like a valediction. Film might be dying, but Dean’s art work was buoyant, a joyful, eleven-minute primer on the medium’s still potent possibilities. There were interior and exterior shots, bits of montage, jokes on flatness and depth, and still and moving images—often all at once. In water, Dean had found an apt metaphor for film—for its continual but spasmodic movement, its translucence, and its ability to capture light. Her carefully layered shots had a sculptural quality; the glass-matte ostrich egg, appearing more than twenty feet tall, protruded from the screen as if it had been hurled right through it. Dean’s masks sometimes left tiny black traces on the edges of shapes onscreen, but the borders were not blurry, as in old movies; they were sharp and irregular, as in an X-ACTO-knife collage.
Dean watched the film in silence. The final shot was of her eye, inside a circle on the Turbine Hall grid. Slowly, the giant eye opened and stared out at the audience. Then it disappeared. ♦
