Immerse yourself in the films of Tacita Dean and your sense of the world shifts. As in all exceptional art, vision remakes itself. In Dean’s work, the play of sound is intrinsic to that remaking. A hum of unseen traffic drones while magpies flit in a web of trees; an orthopaedic boot attached to an elegant oldster clumps percussively over polished parquet in a deserted art deco villa. Often, the commonplace is suddenly revealed as miraculous. The plod of brindle Friesians into a Cornish pasture turns into a ceaselessly flowing rump river; a branch weighted with rosy apples caught by the breeze bobs and curtsies in the autumn light; a backlit fringe of white hair on an old artist’s mottled crown becomes his halo. Everything is heightened, quickened, poetically illuminated in more than the purely kinetic sense, and charged with the intense beauty that is conditional on the presentiment of loss.
‘The old men I film’, Dean says, with witchily dark merriment, as we sit on the terrace of her Berlin studio, ‘seem to die just afterwards.’ And indeed they do depart: the poet Michael Hamburger; the artists Mario Merz and Cy Twombly; the choreographer Merce Cunningham. But they will never be granted more subtly revelatory obituaries.
Now Dean is facing an extinction against which she is fighting with everything she has: the death of film – real film, that is; 16-milimetre celluloid, the indispensable medium of her work, the material that gives her art its uncanny presence. The laws of the marketplace have decreed that digital rules supreme; that film is no more than a quaint relic, and the champions of its immeasurable distinctiveness are deluded romantics. Dean grieves and rages against this smug indifference. Although (exasperatingly, for both of us) Tate Modern has forbidden us to discuss her imminent installation in its Turbine Hall in any detail, she lets on that it will be a vehicle for her impassioned last stand on behalf of the survival of film: ‘Otherwise, we won’t see a projected film again, except in archives and museums.’ It strikes her as an appalling irony that Edwin Parker, her lovely film about Cy Twombly, just made it under the wire for processing before Deluxe – owned by the Twombly collector Ronald O. Perelman – stopped printing 16-milimetre negatives at its Soho Film Lab in London last February.
Dean speaks about the end of film as a ‘heartbreaking bereavement. Very soon, maybe, I won’t be able to make my work if they have their way.’ It’s as if Rembrandt received a letter informing him that, as of next week, oils would no longer be available . . . but not to worry, since acrylic would do the job just as well. Digital is ‘not the same!’ she storms, as the Berlin sky above us dramatically darkens, as if to her prompting. ‘You watch it differently, you handle it differently, you experience it differently.’
Dean is no Luddite though. She has used digital from time to time, but only film – ‘made with chemistry, alchemy, light’ – has drawn great work from her. Her vision, she says, is inseparable from the physical character of the medium, but also from the discipline it imposes on the filmmaker. With one roll of stock lasting three minutes, ‘you have to make decisions. I like the flaws in it that trip you up; the lack of ability to lie.’ She regards digital filmmaking, on the other hand, as sloppily forgiving, indulgent. Sound – so vital to Dean – comes willy-nilly with the digital camera. Film, though, is silent and sound has to be superimposed, fashioned, given its particular timbre and resonance. She thinks the lazy user-friendliness of digital must have something to do with why movies these days ‘bore the pants off me’. And don’t get her started on 3D!
The digital supremacists had better watch out, for Tacita Dean is not only one of the greatest living British artists but also one of the most eloquently headstrong and volubly articulate. She claims to be ‘voiceless’, but if anyone can rescue her beloved medium in much the way that vinyl sound recordings were brought back from the tomb, she can, and perhaps her Turbine Hall installation will turn the tide of doom. ‘It’s not what people are expecting,’ she warns. ‘Am I going to like it?’ I ask, suddenly nervous that the force of her polemic might blunt the poetic subtlety of her images. ‘I dunno,’ she says, giving me one of her mischievous cat-lady grins. ‘Maybe not.’
If that’s the way it turns out it will be a first, although, inevitably, there are some of her films I love more than others, especially those made in an astonishing burst of creativity between 1999 and 2007 – among them Bubble House, a long, steady vision of the modernist shell of an abandoned house on Cayman Brac, in the Cayman Islands. I remember seeing it at the Tate in 1999, in a darkened space, the purr of the projector an intrinsic musical undertone, as rain crashed down on the desolate modernist vanity, an emptied egg of a structure, and the tropical tide washed in, leaving mirroring puddles on the floor. I realised then that her film had none of the slick virtuality of video art; that an element of Dean’s genius lay in allowing what unfolded before her to exert its own unbidden drama on the senses. Shots are held for minutes at a time to savour the subtlety of changes of light and the motion of the waters; the camera takes up a fixed viewpoint, allowing whatever passes to come into frame.
Offer a precis of these films and you might conclude that nothing very much happens. You would be entirely mistaken. In the stunning Banewl, those lowing Friesians are led through a gate into a meadow overlooking the sea. They chomp to their own luxurious measure. Above them, excited swallows soar and swoop. The light fades – and little by little the animal world registers the optical tremor of the oncoming solar eclipse well before Dean and her cameraman. The cows stare fixedly at the camera as if attempting to tip off the oblivious filmmakers of the imminence of darkness. ‘We sat there thinking it was about to rain,’ recalls Dean. The swallows go frantic. ‘Everything went to roost. It was so atavistic.’ As the cows lower themselves heavily, the light turns mother-of-pearl, then pale copper, before leaching away altogether. In the gloaming, a lighthouse Dean hadn’t known was there reveals itself. The scene is simply cows, birds, grass, lighthouse, sea and, as light breaks afresh, a cocky rooster straight out of La Fontaine . . . yet you’ll seldom see a more cosmically loaded drama.
The effect of Tacita Dean’s patient gaze, and of her exquisite talent for composition (each and every frame of hers is a living painting, a Cuyp or a Vermeer), is hypnotic, though she claims to have no feel for single images. However, it is a hypnosis not of other-worldly drowsiness but something like the opposite: an acute sharpening of perception. All the standard fetishes of modern filmmaking – hyper-ventilated hand-held cameras, antsy cutting, bloated mood music, pedestrian commentary – are stripped away, leaving exposed the tangible reality of lived experience. Her work is a palate-cleanser for our jaded sensibilities; an invitation to apprehend the fine thread of life before it slips away through our fingers. The exhilarating result could not be further away from the splashy artifice of much contemporary art, with its strenuous itch to startle or joke.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Dean’s work glides above the circus of trends, for her obsessional subject is the corrosion of time. She has always been a cat who walks by herself, or, as she likes to say, ‘really weird’. She is certainly that unfashionable thing – a connoisseur of anomaly, a visual archaeologist of modern relics. Sound Mirrors takes its name from the tracking devices planted in the Kent countryside to detect incoming German aircraft, but in Dean’s imaging they seem to turn into dolmens of a more ancient world. Gellért features hefty Hungarian women gossiping in the steamy dimness of marble-walled therapeutic baths. Neutral-coloured shifts cling to them like second skins, casings for their sausagey bulk; Chaucer or Bruegel brought to Budapest. Dean is not above doing what’s necessary to get the picture right. Knowing they were going to be filmed, the staff of the baths turned up in ‘appalling swimwear’. Instead, Dean encouraged them to dress in those peculiar garments they oblige everyone else to wear.
Dean’s brother, Ptolemy, is an authority on architectural restoration, and, wanting to know something about the parents who laid those classical monikers on their children, I wonder out loud about the siblings’ interest in ruin. ‘Maybe because my father was one,’ she observes with a rueful laugh. The damage was done by her grandfather, Basil Dean, one of the founding fathers of British talking movies in the 1930s, much married, notoriously womanising, who let his son know that he had never really been wanted.
So even if the legacy had its dark side, film is in Tacita Dean’s blood. Mostly, though, Tacita wanted out of the enfolding cosiness of Kent. After a foundation year in Canterbury she ended up – despite stiff parental disapproval – as a student at Falmouth School of Art: ‘I chose it because it was so far away.’ She arrived to find the place shrouded in deep Cornish fog, with foghorns sounding from the harbour. Dean fell for the Romantic atmospherics.
There were all of forty students in each of the three years, and the doughty Dean rowed in the ‘pilot gig’ races, ploughing through the waves in howling gales and heavy seas: ‘wooden seats, none of this moving seat pansy stuff’. Her first circuit was round St Michael’s Mount. ‘What with a serious dope smoker in the bow, we were so last that they started the other race before we got back.’ She laughs about it all, but that exposure to the consuming force of the sea – its power to scramble the charts, and play fast and loose with location – would become a powerful motif in her early films. Lighthouses and wrecks, abandoned boats and trembling marine horizons would shimmer through her work like Melvillean phantoms.
The sirens called to Dean from other seas, too – the Aegean, the next in her odyssey. In Athens, trying to get her artistic bearings, she endured ‘a depressive Greek painter who didn’t leave his room and his mad actress girlfriend . . . really crazy’. She then applied for a Greek scholarship in animation, ‘which I didn’t get, thank God; that would have been a false move’. Instead, Dean spent a winter on the island of Aegina, commuting by ferry to Athens.
Back in London, more applications ensued, but she was ‘always falling between painting and film’. In 1990, the baronies of the art colleges (painting and media studies especially) wanted nothing to do with each other. Dean was admitted to the painting department of the Slade School of Fine Art on condition she promised never to make films. ‘You lied,’ I say. ‘I lied,’ she concedes, with an unrepentant smile. Billed by the faculty as The Troublemaker, at least one now famous woman painter, then her junior at the Slade, remembers her as a fiery role model of creative independence and the soul of friendliness.
Dean describes her career as moved along by a chain of ‘miracles’ and spooky epiphanies, discovering, for instance, the factory at Chalon-sur-Saône that had just stopped making film, which gave her the perfect location for its elegy, Kodak, one of the most visually compelling of her works. ‘You’re too late,’ they told her when she asked to film. ‘I like too late,’ she replied.
It was another such time-bending coincidence that drove her to the experiments in fact and fiction that are at the heart of much of her strongest work. On discovering a photograph from 1928 of an Australian girl stowaway, bound for Falmouth, Dean began to spin the story in her imagination: first, the photo disappeared along with her bag from a Heathrow X-ray machine when she was about to board a flight to Glasgow. The picture and bag turned up mysteriously on a carousel at Dublin airport, at which point Dean decided to fabricate a newspaper story in the style of the 1920s, imagining the girl and the ship both bound for Ireland. Digging a little deeper, she discovered that a ship called the Herzogin Cecilie had in fact run aground in 1936 off the Devon coast. Fearing that the reek of salt-rotted grain cargo would get up the noses of holidaymakers, the local authorities had it towed to a less conspicuous mooring in Starehole Bay, where it was promptly wrecked.
Pursuing the story, Dean went to film the ruin, completed her shots on a July morning, departed, and then learned that perhaps a few hours later a woman had been raped and murdered exactly where she had been shooting. Two wrecks, maritime and human; two kinds of reports; fact and fiction suddenly swam together in her imagination.
Girl Stowaway (1994) became her first experiment in this kind of broken story, with the narrative splintered like driftwood on the rocks. Later, her extraordinary Teignmouth Electron explored the story of the eponymous trimaran entered in a round-the-world yacht race in 1968 by the delusional Donald Crowhurst, who faked his coordinates during the race before plunging into the sea. The boat beaching on Cayman Brac followed, and in turn led to Dean’s discovery of the Bubble House.
It was a tremendous breakthrough, but its timing didn’t fit the ‘So what’s next?’ finger-tapping urgencies of the art world. In 1998, when she was nominated for the Turner Prize, all Dean had to show was the Budapest bath-house piece Gellért. And there was the matter of the peculiarity of her commingling of the modern and the archaic. YBA (Young British Artists) was quick-hit buzz; Tacita Dean has always been about the harvest of concentration. Even now she is amazed that she was approached about the Turbine Hall installation. ‘I never thought they would turn to an artist like me . . . my attraction to the quiet.’ At the time of the Turner, ‘I was a nobody. I just wasn’t part of the whole social thing.’ She shrugs, amused at the memory.
She knows it was just as well. Being un-Turnered made her detachment from the YBA scene that much easier. A fellowship took her instead to Berlin, from where she produced a steady succession of masterpieces. But even in a city where she became gently embedded, if not rooted, it was the instability of location and memory that caught her muse. In Fernsehturm (2001), her version of the German revolution revolves in a moving restaurant at the top of the city’s television tower. In this favoured watering hole of the former East German elite, overlooking the Alexanderplatz, her camera is still; but the place turns, ever so slowly, a relic of a world somehow preserved in historical aspic. As the light beyond the windows changes from day to night an antique organist strikes up ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. Even here, Dean had a little ‘miracle’. A group of tables remained empty while its occupants were delayed playing the casino tables (as customers always did in the Old Days), so there is room for her camera to do its gentle surveying. It is the most tender take one could imagine on history as human comedy, even in the lingering shadows of Stasiland.
There are so many beauties for anyone unfamiliar with Dean’s work to dive into as an introduction that to choose one seems invidious. However, Boots has the Dean alchemy working to perfection. Boots was Tacita’s sister’s handsome godfather, nicknamed for his clumping orthopaedic shoe. His history was raffish enough for Dean to bring Boots – sticks, pacemaker and all – into a deserted Portuguese art deco villa, where she imagined him playing its architect. As strong-minded as his goddaughter, Boots thought he would do better as the lover of Blanche, the model for whom the villa had been built. Up its steps he stumps, through its elegant columns; the sweet music of erotic memory coming to him. ‘She was quite a good lover,’ he says by her marbled bathroom. ‘We did interesting things together. Simple sex doesn’t amuse me. [Pause.] It didn’t amuse her either.’ Outside, birds warble; a golden light washes through the blonde rooms and Dean’s humanely expansive lens allows this little flood of make-believe to seem utterly true.
That’s why Tacita Dean is so passionate on the subject of film. For, in our digitally meretricious age, film retains – though only perhaps in the hands of her particular genius – the priceless gift of poetic truth.