Tacita Dean

Recently, working on another project in Utah, Tacita Dean noticed that land in the distance was changing shape — as were the trucks moving along a distant highway. Using the little 16mm film she had in hand, she managed to film the elusive fata morgana.

Throughout the 19th century, imaginative and visionary artists and inventors brought about the advent of a new look, absolutely modern and truly cinematographic, long before the revolutionary invention of the Lumière brothers and the arrival of December 28, 1895, the historic day on which the first cinema performance took place.

Promises: Through Congress is a collaboration between Julie Mehretu, electronic music composer Floating Points aka Sam Shepherd, and filmmaker Trevor Tweeten. This 46-minute film features Mehretu’s expansive painting Congress (2003) and Promises (Luaka Bop, 2021), the acclaimed album from Floating Points and jazz titan Pharoah Sanders featuring the London Symphony Orchestra. Filmed on location at The Broad in Los Angeles.

Dean’s work is characterized by a sense of history, time and place, light quality, and the essence of the film itself. In line with these themes, the project will compose of a two-screen 35 mm film installation celebrating the quality and techniques of photochemical film. Derived from the origin of her own sister’s name, Antigone takes its starting point from the undramatized part between two of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, whose mythological character, Antigone, guides her blind and lame father, Oedipus, through the wilderness. The film will underscore the importance of film experimentation and highlight the endeavor of film, as a medium, to find a form between art, cinema and theater.

Dean’s work is characterized by a sense of history, time and place, light quality, and the essence of the film itself. In line with these themes, the project will compose of a two-screen 35 mm film installation celebrating the quality and techniques of photochemical film. Derived from the origin of her own sister’s name, Antigone takes its starting point from the undramatized part between two of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, whose mythological character, Antigone, guides her blind and lame father, Oedipus, through the wilderness. The film will underscore the importance of film experimentation and highlight the endeavor of film, as a medium, to find a form between art, cinema and theater.

A bird tweets from a power line in Venice, California.

A portrait of three actors of different generations who have all portrayed Hamlet: David Warner, Stephen Dillane and Ben Whishaw.

A portrait of actor David Warner with hummingbirds.

The “digital revolution” reached the cinema late and was chiefly styled as a technological advancement. Today, in an era where analog celluloid strips are disappearing, and given the diversity of digital moving picture formats, there is much more at stake: Are the world’s film archives on the brink of a dark age? Are we facing the massive loss of collective audiovisual memory? Is film dying, or just changing? CINEMA FUTURES travels to international locations and, together with renowned filmmakers, museum curators, historians and engineers, dramatizes the future of film and the cinema in the age of digital moving pictures.

The 16-minute colour film observes Hockney smoking five cigarettes and thinking about painting in his Los Angeles studio, surrounded by a series of portrait paintings that featured in his 2016 exhibition at the RA (82 Portraits and 1 Still-life)

"'Event for a Stage’ is a 16mm film I made in 2015 with the actor Stephen Dillane. I normally project the work as film inside galleries and museums, and occasionally cinemas. I have always been steadfast about showing my films in the medium with which they were made and were always intended to be shown. I have therefore never allowed them to be streamed online or ever projected digitally. Film is a very different way of making and seeing a work, and over the years, I have campaigned to keep photochemical mediums available to artists and filmmakers, and I have found that I have done this best this by continuing to make and show my works in and on film."

"Tacita Dean’s JG is inspired by her correspondence with Ballard regarding connections between his short story 'The Voices of Time' (1960) and Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork and film SPIRAL JETTY (both works, 1970). JG is a 35mm anamorphic film shot on location in the saline landscapes of Utah and central California using Dean’s recently developed and patented system of aperture gate masking. An unprecedented departure from her previous 16mm films, JG tries to respond to Ballard’s challenge – posed to her shortly before he died – that Dean should 'treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would solve.' " - Anthology Film Archives

A richly textured essay film on landscape, art, history, life and loss, Patience (After Sebald) offers a unique exploration of the work of internationally acclaimed writer W.G. Max Sebald (1944 - 2001) via a walk through East Anglia tracking his most influential book, The Rings of Saturn. The much anticipated new feature by the Grierson Award-winning director of Joy Division, Patience is the first film about Sebald internationally, marking ten years since the writer's untimely death, and with contributions from major writers, artists and film-makers.

A film by Tacita Dean

A film by Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean took up the challenge of filling Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2011. Her response, entitled 'FILM', is a silent 35mm looped film projected onto a monolith standing 13 metres tall.

Manhattan Mouse Museum takes a glimpse into the world of American Pop Art icon Claes Oldenburg as he tends to an assembly of small curios, objects, and artworks.

Craneway Event marks the second collaboration between acclaimed Berlin-based, British artist Tacita Dean and the legendary, late choreographer Merce Cunningham. Shot in 16mm colour anamorphic film, Craneway Event documents Cunningham's company over three days in November 2008 as they rehearsed for an event in the light filled craneway of an abandoned Ford Motors factory in California. Dean's film practice embodies a romantic and insistent materialism, often documenting forgotten moments and spaces teetering on the edge of disappearance. While her predisposition towards the ephemeral is often grounded in the physical world, as a feature length film, Craneway Event solicits an experience of duration that transcends the materiality of space. Craneway Event is the grand beauty and scale of empty industrial space, the delicacy of light, time and air, and the eloquence and subtlety of movement in the visionary work of Merce Cunningham.

Craneway Event marks the second collaboration between acclaimed Berlin-based, British artist Tacita Dean and the legendary, late choreographer Merce Cunningham. Shot in 16mm colour anamorphic film, Craneway Event documents Cunningham's company over three days in November 2008 as they rehearsed for an event in the light filled craneway of an abandoned Ford Motors factory in California. Dean's film practice embodies a romantic and insistent materialism, often documenting forgotten moments and spaces teetering on the edge of disappearance. While her predisposition towards the ephemeral is often grounded in the physical world, as a feature length film, Craneway Event solicits an experience of duration that transcends the materiality of space. Craneway Event is the grand beauty and scale of empty industrial space, the delicacy of light, time and air, and the eloquence and subtlety of movement in the visionary work of Merce Cunningham.

Craneway Event marks the second collaboration between acclaimed Berlin-based, British artist Tacita Dean and the legendary, late choreographer Merce Cunningham. Shot in 16mm colour anamorphic film, Craneway Event documents Cunningham's company over three days in November 2008 as they rehearsed for an event in the light filled craneway of an abandoned Ford Motors factory in California. Dean's film practice embodies a romantic and insistent materialism, often documenting forgotten moments and spaces teetering on the edge of disappearance. While her predisposition towards the ephemeral is often grounded in the physical world, as a feature length film, Craneway Event solicits an experience of duration that transcends the materiality of space. Craneway Event is the grand beauty and scale of empty industrial space, the delicacy of light, time and air, and the eloquence and subtlety of movement in the visionary work of Merce Cunningham.

Two pears dissolve in a bottle of Schnapps.

The life and work of enigmatic Dutch/Californian conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who in 1975 disappeared under mysterious circumstances at sea in the smallest boat ever to cross the Atlantic. As seen through the eyes of fellow emigrant filmmaker René Daalder, the picture becomes a sweeping overview of contemporary art films as well as an epic saga of the transformative powers of the ocean.

Continuing her recent collection of film portraits, Tacita Dean’s Michael Hamburger is a moving portrayal of the poet and translator, a resident of Middleton in Suffolk and great friend of W.G. Sebald.

Noir et Blanc, a 16 mm black-and-white film also presented at the Guggenheim, literalizes this sense of reaching an endpoint: The four-and-a-half-minute, fully abstract variation on Kodak’s theme was created using the few remaining rolls of double-sprocketed black-and-white film the artist could source. There are now apparently none left in the world. Where does Dean go from here?

Experimental documentary about the now closed Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône where they made 16 mm film.

Footsteps, clocks chiming, female voices speaking in German and dusk birdsong.

A filmed conversation between Winton Dean and Jonathan Balcon about their fathers Basil Dean (1888 –1978) and Michael Balcon (1896 –1977). Both men helped to pave the way for the British film industry.

A filmed conversation between Winton Dean and Jonathan Balcon about their fathers Basil Dean (1888 –1978) and Michael Balcon (1896 –1977). Both men helped to pave the way for the British film industry.

'Mario Merz' was made in San Gimignano in Tuscany, Italy where Dean was invited to a residency in summer 2002. Dean's film is a study of the ageing artist in the last year of his life. Merz is observed sitting in silence under a tree, a large pinecone in his hand. The film is ostensibly a portrait, but more importantly is a study of light in space and form in nature - central concerns in Merz's sculptural investigations.

Dean’s film comprises a forty-four minute static shot looking across the restaurant interior towards the curved wall of windows that allows diners to observe the city from above while they eat. As in many of her films, the artist used an anamorphic lens, resulting in a long rectangular view that constitutes a radial crop of the spherical restaurant space. The single shot was filmed late in the afternoon of the 12 October 2000, during the period when day turns to night, thus recording the slowly changing light at the same time as the thirty-minute rotation of the restaurant. As colours in the sky fade before deepening and blackening, the restaurant interior fluctuates between visibility and obscurity until the fluorescent lights are switched on, transforming the window surfaces from transparent glass to reflecting screens. With the onset of evening, diners appear and music is played for them on an electrical organ.

A static and silent shot of a sunset off the western coast of Madagascar. Tacita Dean filmed the ‘green ray’, a legendary natural phenomenon that takes place when, in specific atmospheric circumstances, the last ray of sun passes over the horizon and becomes green.

A static and silent shot of a sunset off the western coast of Madagascar. Tacita Dean filmed the ‘green ray’, a legendary natural phenomenon that takes place when, in specific atmospheric circumstances, the last ray of sun passes over the horizon and becomes green.

Banewl was filmed entirely within the two hour and forty minute period of the total eclipse of the sun on 11 August 1999, and takes its title from a phonetic transcription of the Cornish pronunciation of the dairy farm’s name, ‘Burnewhall’. Because the day was overcast, the film became less about the event and more about the place during the event. The eclipse was about waiting for darkness to happen and then equally for the return of a normal sun. The clouds allowed us to experience this coincidence of cosmic time and scale on our terms and in our own human time, measuring it against the movements of animals and the fine detailing of our natural world.

While documenting the decayed hull of the Teignmouth Electron, my companion and I drove up the other road on the hurricane coast of the small island and came across the Bubble House. Deserted and half-complete, it was built by a Frenchman who, according to the people of the island, embezzled money from the American government and was now doing 35 years in Tampa prison for fraud. Both boat and house were welcome neglect on an otherwise over pampered island and sit side by side in this exhibition as they do on Cayman Brac.

Dean filmed huge concrete, curved structures built in Dungeness in the UK, which date back to the 1920s. They were constructed as a pre-radar sound tracking system, where the curved concrete structures gathered sound which were listened to by people with a sort of stethoscope, the aim of which was to give warning of hostile aircraft attacks. Since it was impossible to distinguish between hostile sounds and other sounds, the experiment was abandoned and in any case the entire installation became obsolete because of the development of radar.

Disappearance at Sea (1996) is a 16 mm colour film with sound shot on location at the lighthouse on St Abb’s Head in Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England.

Disappearance at Sea (1996) is a 16 mm colour film with sound shot on location at the lighthouse on St Abb’s Head in Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England.

Disappearance at Sea (1996) is a 16 mm colour film with sound shot on location at the lighthouse on St Abb’s Head in Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England.

Disappearance at Sea (1996) is a 16 mm colour film with sound shot on location at the lighthouse on St Abb’s Head in Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England.

Disappearance at Sea (1996) is a 16 mm colour film with sound shot on location at the lighthouse on St Abb’s Head in Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England.

A film by Tacita Dean

A film by Tacita Dean

A film by Tacita Dean

A film by Tacita Dean

A film by Tacita Dean

50 ½ minute 16 mm continuous film loop of artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu in conversation. The idea for a film featuring Hurtado and Mehretu grew out of Dean’s incredible chance discovery, in 2019, that these two artists, both longtime friends of hers, shared the same birthday of November 28—and, moreover, that in 2020, Julie would be turning 50, and Luchita 100. Filmed over the course of a single day, January 3, 2020, in Hurtado’s Santa Monica apartment, the artists’ conversation meanders through subjects ranging from motherhood, to the environment, to their experiences immigrating to the U.S. as children, and, most movingly, to painting as a way of understanding one’s place in the world. description adapted from Jennifer King, associate curator of contemporary art at LACMA

50 ½ minute 16 mm continuous film loop of artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu in conversation. The idea for a film featuring Hurtado and Mehretu grew out of Dean’s incredible chance discovery, in 2019, that these two artists, both longtime friends of hers, shared the same birthday of November 28—and, moreover, that in 2020, Julie would be turning 50, and Luchita 100. Filmed over the course of a single day, January 3, 2020, in Hurtado’s Santa Monica apartment, the artists’ conversation meanders through subjects ranging from motherhood, to the environment, to their experiences immigrating to the U.S. as children, and, most movingly, to painting as a way of understanding one’s place in the world. description adapted from Jennifer King, associate curator of contemporary art at LACMA

In the centre of the gallery is a pavilion housing the 35mm film Paradise (2021), the final work of the trilogy. It is the first time that Paradise is being shown as an artwork outside of its staging in the ballet. The soundtrack is a digital simulation of Thomas Adès’s orchestrated score Paradiso. Known technically as a MIDI, the computer simulation became an invaluable tool while the orchestra were unable to record the music during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Paradise was filmed in the extended format Cinemascope and is entirely abstract, drawing on the circular and planetary motifs present in Dante’s ‘Paradiso’. The film’s rich colours were taken from the palette of William Blake (b. 1757 – d. 1827, London) and can also be seen in the ten hand-printed silkscreen prints representing the planetary states in the corridor.