Tacita Dean's FILM Makes Its US Debut in Los Angeles

Tacita Dean's 2011 installation FILM, first commissioned for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, is making its United States debut at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles.

The work is an 11-minute silent 35mm film projected onto a column measuring 31 feet tall. Dean achieved the towering vertical image by turning an anamorphic lens 90 degrees. The result looms in the dark of the foundation's Theater Gallery, according to the exhibition's installation views, like a colossal doorway.

Sprocket holes that advance the celluloid through a projector border the composition. The screen itself becomes a massive film strip. Film is both Dean's subject and her medium.

What does the work look like?

The moving pictures are insistently material: grainy, flickering, mottled by dust and interrupted by flashes of overexposure. The imagery includes simmering shots of cathedral windows and vine-ripe tomatoes. These passages feel sensuous, even vital.

The contrast with contemporary image culture is the point. There is a formal correspondence, the artist's argument implies, between the endless scroll of a social media feed and a spool of 35mm photographic film. But the similarities end there. Unlike the slick, frictionless stream of homogeneous imagery circulating the internet — polished by filters and increasingly artificially generated — FILM foregrounds the physical texture of photochemical film.

Viewers sit in a pool of light reflected off the polished floor, heads tilted upward, while the projector whirs at a low, steady pitch.

Why did Dean defend film so fiercely?

Dean has argued that moving from film to digital would mean changing artistic mediums completely. In a 2011 op-ed for the Guardian, she wrote: "It is not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics but something deeper — something to do with poetry."

The quote dates from the period of the work's creation, when Dean was publicly campaigning for the survival of 35mm film as manufacturers discontinued stock and labs closed. The op-ed stands as the clearest statement of the position that FILM embodies.

The installation makes that case physically rather than rhetorically. Every frame carries the marks of its own making: grain, flicker, dust, overexposure.

What does the US debut change?

The Los Angeles presentation gives American audiences their first chance to see the work in person, in a venue the exhibition materials describe as similarly cavernous to the Turbine Hall — the Theater Gallery at the Marciano Art Foundation.

The move carries a caveat worth noting. A work built for one monumental space does not automatically translate to another; how the projection, sound of the projector and reflected light behave in the new room will determine whether the Los Angeles showing carries the force of the London original. What is not in question is the timing: as artificially generated imagery spreads, Dean's defense of film's materiality reads less like nostalgia and more like a proposition about what an image is.

The work remains, in Dean's framing, poetry before it is technology.