Film: Film

“I suddenly realised we are just about to lose this really beautiful medium we created 125 years ago.”Tate Modern presents the twelfth commission of the Unilever Series – in a montage of flickering images and flashing lights – artist Tacita Dean has created an 11 minute silent film using analogue technology. Complete with topsy-turvy camera tricks and fade-outs, the dramatically titled Film is a visual enigma projected onto a large white monolith at the end of the darkened Turbine Hall.

In this case, the Unilever Series has been used by the artist as a platform to voice her concern over the endangered nature of analogue film in an increasingly digitalised era. Speaking on the vulnerable position of film Dean has said, “Digital is also a fantastic medium. It’s got massive potential… But I love film and I don’t want to lose my ability to make film and it looks like I probably will.”

The installation provides a window into the grainy, out-of-focus and sadly, almost out of fashion avant-garde world of filmmaking. But will this bleak projection save an endangered art from extinction? The film itself lacks substance and so the motivation and meaning behind Film is perhaps more poetic than the sum of its eleven lonely minutes.

Dean could have used her film as a medium to celebrate and expose the very best of analogue filmmaking; it had the potential to promote an analogue revival after our digital revolution. Instead she falls short of connecting with her audience, so in the understated elegance and stripped down simplicity of Film, her message is lost. Even so, there is a quiet kind of reverence whilst watching, but whether this is because the audience are so enraptured or entirely flummoxed is hard to tell. In the accompanying description Dean explains, “Film is about film… Film is a visual poem.” The message is cryptic; it ostracises viewers who may be unfamiliar with analogue film making and almost fails to create the buzz photochemical film needs to ensure it is preserved.

Ultimately, Dean’s fear is that as photochemical labs close down, analogue filming may be forgotten. And in the end, while her 11 minutes might not be the most inspiring or even interesting, the integrity with which Film has been created cannot be ignored. I still can’t say I fully comprehend the vastly different techniques used, nor the painstakingly great lengths Dean has gone to in creating each meticulous minute. So perhaps the installation is summed up more eloquently by artist herself, ”I’ve turned the Turbine Hall into a strip of film and conflate the imagined with the real in the wonder space that is experimental film.”

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