“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.”

—Tacita Dean

The creative practice of artist Tacita Dean spans numerous mediums, materials, and disciplines, but she is perhaps most intimately associated with her exquisite and multifaceted work with motion picture film. In a career that has spanned more than three decades, Dean has employed film as a crucial and defining component of her practice, investigating a vast array of subjects and themes uniquely suited to the medium and its distinctive capability to give material form to our fleeting, subjective experiences.

Among her nearly one hundred works on Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm film, it is Dean’s monumental 2011 installation FILM that most vividly stands as a testament to the aesthetic and technological qualities that have made it so compelling to the artist as a medium. Conceived at a time when analog filmmaking tools and processes seemed in serious jeopardy of disappearing, Dean’s piece acts as both a large-scale tribute and insistent statement about the singular depth, beauty, and vitality of film.

FILM was first produced as a project commissioned by Tate Modern in 2011 for the museum’s vast Turbine Hall space. The artist’s resulting 11 minute long, silent 35 mm film installation takes Dean’s beloved medium as both its material and subject. Projected onto a vertical screen reminiscent of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, FILM takes the form of a monumental strip of film gloriously emerging from the floor of the gallery. As FILM unfolds, the viewer experiences complex cinematic compositions that intercut a variety of images such as a waterfall, a street clock, a pine tree, a smokestack, a flickering bulb, a mountain, and an enormous ostrich egg, with color filtered shots of the industrial architecture of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The image is framed left and right with sprocket holes, a normally unseen technical necessity for propelling film through a projector but present in FILM as part of the image, giving Dean’s piece the visual quality of an enormous 35mm film strip.

In order to create this contemplative paean to the wonder of photochemical film, Dean revived and reconceived century-old and largely abandoned silent film era techniques such as glass matte painting, gate masking and in-camera superimposition of multiple images, while the work’s colossal verticality was achieved by employing an anamorphic lens turned 90 degrees, which doubled the height of the frame. Taken together, these techniques speak to an emphatic embrace of the qualities of analog, physical film that are utterly unique to its language and impossible to duplicate or even emulate in a digital format.

As a hallucinatory cinematic apparition, FILM brings together the handmade and the visionary with the playful and the profound, freely collaging in-camera passages of breathtaking beauty and surrealist dissonance with numerous moments of surprise, humor, and absurdity. Regardless of whether we’re aware of the process behind the piece, or the labor and ingenuity that it clearly required, the end result has the effortlessness of an exhilarating magic trick. With its images flowing together like luminous elements of a wordless poem, FILM opens up an uncanny space of reverie and wonder, allowing an underestimated and often overlooked medium to be the immersive subject of its own thrilling spectacle.

Organized by MAF Director Hanneke Skerath and independent curator Mark Toscano, this will mark the first time the work has been presented in the United States.