GREAT BRITAIN / LONDON : THE UNILEVER SERIES BY TACITA DEAN

until Sunday March 11 2012
10.00 – 18.00
Tate Modern
Turbine Hall, Bankside
SE1 9TG London
Great Britain

www.tate.org.uk

Entitled FILM, the work is an eleven-minute silent film projected onto a monolith standing at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall. It is the first work in The Unilever Series to be devoted to the moving image.

FILM is a portrait of the analogue, photochemical, non-digital medium of film. It was made by turning a Cinemascope lens 90º and upending the usual landscape format of the movie screen so it becomes vertical, scaling itself to the proportions of the Turbine Hall. FILM has been constructed using in-camera and studio techniques, such as masking, double-exposure and glass matte painting, to recapture the sense of wonderment generated by these skills during the early days of cinema. The images have been deliberately created during the film shoot rather than in post-production and edited by hand by the artist alone, evoking a sense of intimacy and a lightness of touch. Tacita Dean has placed her trust in the blindness and spontaneity of the analogue process in order, she explains, "to show film as film can be - film in its purest form."

Tacita Dean has worked with film throughout her career — it is her working material, and she has written that she needs "the stuff of film as a painter needs the stuff of paint." In recent months she has voiced her concern about the declining availability and access to film as digital technologies become the norm and photochemical labs close down.

With her project for the Turbine Hall and the accompanying book, Dean wants to highlight the threat that film is under, and the impact its loss will have on our culture and the future impossibility of watching over a hundred years of filmmaking in its original form.

FILM seeks not only to invigorate this debate but also to stand as a testament to the distinctive qualities of this unique medium.