American Cinematographer - June 2015 - 80h

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK. She studied
at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before
moving to Berlin on a DAAD scholarship in 2000 where she
continues to live and work.
In 2011, she made FILM as part of the Unilever Series of
commissions in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, which marked the
beginning of her campaign to protect the medium of photochemical
ﬁlm (www.saveﬁlm.org).
When Dean won the Kurt Schwitters Prize in
2009, her ﬁlms were described as expressing
something that neither painting nor photography
could capture. "They are purely ﬁlm. (...) Dean's
art is carried by a sense of history, time and place,
light quality and the essence of the ﬁlm itself. The
focus of her subtle but ambitious work is the truth
of the moment, the ﬁlm as a medium and the
sensibilities of the individual."
Her most recent ﬁlm, Event for a Stage had its
world premiere at the 52nd Theatertreffen in
Berlin in May. The ﬁlm originated as a work made
for a stage with the actor Stephen Dillane. The
crew of four, who ﬁlmed it on 16mm, became
part of the event as well as the ﬁlm, highlighting such things as ﬁlm
magazine length.
Here, Tacita discusses her decision to use ﬁlm in her work:
Why is ﬁlm your choice of medium?
When I left art school, I began working with ﬁlm as an artist,
which is very different from using it as a ﬁlmmaker. It is essential to
understand that I use it as my medium, as you would use any other
artistic medium. Increasingly, as my medium became threatened, I
started to make ﬁlms that could only be made on ﬁlm, using all of its
internal qualities. Not only the relationship between the grain and
the visual side of it, but also all the disciplines that happen with ﬁlm.
You're always working with ﬁnite periods of time because of your
roll length, and in order to give even the appearance of seamless real
time, you have to go to the artiﬁce of editing.
Can you tell us more about your process?
I do all of my own editing, and I still cut my ﬁlms on a cutting
table, so I need print. I work the same way that a sculptor would
work with plaster or stone. I work with material, so I need the stuff
at that point in the process, the physical resistance of the material.
I work with sync sound sometimes so need to use mag. I record my

kodak.com/go/motion
@Kodak_ShootFilm
KodakShootFilm
KodakMotionPictureFilm

sound digitally but transfer it to mag to cut the ﬁlm. Then the sound
design goes back to digital, but then in the end it becomes optical,
analogue again. I love working with ﬁlm. Mainly I love cutting it.
That's when I make the work. It's just the ﬁlm and me.
Tell us a little about your project, FILM.
When I made FILM, which was the project I did for the Turbine
Hall at Tate Modern in London, I went back to the origins of
ﬁlmmaking, when it was an exciting new
medium. I looked at all of the things they
invented then, like aperture gate masking,
glass matte painting, illusion and mirrors
and backdrops. I wanted the whole ﬁlm
to be exposed inside the camera, with no
postproduction. It was a 35mm, portrait format,
anamorphic ﬁlm, which was projected 13 meters
tall. There was nothing done afterwards, except
for the editing. So it's all about what is imprinted
onto the emulsion in that moment.
The Turbine Hall is a very high-proﬁle event,
so a lot of journalists asked, "Why can't this be
digital?" And my argument was that maybe you
could copy it digitally, although I'm not sure that
would be even possible, but you could never arrive at it digitally
because it's entirely made as a result of the internal disciplines of
ﬁlm with many things you cannot anticipate. These are the magical,
and I'd say chemical or alchemical, qualities of ﬁlm that are unique
to it. And no amount of imitation can ever produce the same things.
As an artist, it's about the materiality, the experience, the encounter
with the original object, which is so essential. It's what museums and
artists do. It gives you the experience with the real object.
How important is it to you to know that the images you're
capturing will still be viable years from now? Do you believe that
people overlook this?
Oh God, yes. You only have to talk to someone like Christopher
Nolan, who puts it so perfectly when he says that ﬁlm is resolution
independent. If you don't protect the original object, and you just
invest in making a 2K digital copy, very soon that 2K digital copy is
going to look crude. Then you're going to want to make a 4K, or a
10K, or a future-K of it, and you've lost the original object.
To read the full interview with Tacita Dean, go to In Camera online
at www.kodak.com/go/motion
Photo: The artist filming "Teignmouth Electron" in Cayman Brac, September 1998. Photo © Kjetil Berge.

InCamera is published by Eastman Kodak Company. To see our expanded online edition, go to www.kodak.com/go/incamera. To be
featured in the magazine, please contact your local representative. You will ﬁnd your Kodak representative contact information at
www.kodak.com/go/motioncontact.
© Kodak, 2015. Kodak and Vision are trademarks of Eastman Kodak Company. OSCAR is a trademark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences. EMMY is a trademark of, and copyrighted by, the National Academy and American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Imax is a registered trademark of the Imax Corporation.
The opinions expressed by individuals quoted in articles in InCamera do not necessarily represent those of Kodak Limited, Eastman Kodak
Company or the editors of InCamera. Because of our constant endeavour to improve quality and design, modiﬁcations may be made to
products from time to time. Details of stock availability and speciﬁcations given in this publication are subject to change without notice.

http://www.savefilm.org http://www.kodak.com/go/motion http://www.kodak.com/go/incamera http://www.kodak.com/go/motion http://www.kodak.com/go/motioncontact http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

American Cinematographer - June 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2015