Between the glitch and the grain

What better venue than the city’s oldest museum, to host a lecture by an artist, whose enduring endeavour has been the preservation of the medium of film? The Bhau Daji Lad (BDL) museum at Byculla that played host to visual artist Tacita Dean’s talk – ‘Process and the non-deliberate act : why the medium of film is important to artists’, last week, was perfect to encounter work, that both reveres and celebrates an older medium for its ‘perfect flaws’.

As England-born, Berlin and LA based Dean put it, “Film enables me to make magic that digital can’t” where “the accidents are extremely important”. Dean’s reasoning behind this crusade to save film – this “beautiful, robust” medium as she called it – lies somewhere within the realm of differences between the glitch and the grain. Where on the one hand digital snags like pixelation can be an eyesore, grainy film on the other only elevates the experience of viewing. Even as Dean presented her work on a slide carousel – a rarity in itself, one felt a palpable sense of the magic that she alluded to more than once during the course of the talk. A sense of wonder that ensued on hearing the 8mm film projector come to life, albeit for just a few moments, balanced out the disappointment that followed when it refused to come back to life.

Dean and Hollywood director Christopher Nolan were in the city for a line-up of film-related events in collaboration with filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation. The artiste is founder of the online forum – SaveFilm.org – a petition to UNESCO “to protect and safeguard the medium of film, the knowledge and practice of filmmaking and the projection of film print…” Dungarpur shared startling statistics in the catalogue accompanying the talk that show dwindling numbers for photochemical films: “In 2010, there were 1,274 feature-length films shot on celluloid and none on digital, in 2013-14...188 feature films on film and 1,178 on digital. In 2016-17, there was just one feature length film shot on celluloid and 1,986 in digital format.” A complete reversal in less than a decade.

Why would someone lug around tonnes of film equipment when one can pack a quick digicam or video recorder in a tiny suitcase and have it travel around the world? While acknowledging the draw of the phenomenon, Dean argued how digital after all is quick, cheap, handy and convenient. The Green Ray, a 2001 film shot by Dean on 16mm, tells you why. In pursuit of this almost mythical spectacle, that Dean defines as “the last ray of the dying sun to refract and bend beneath the horizon” since the green ray, “... is just slower than the red or the yellow ray”, the artist found herself filming the setting sun on a beach in a far flung village on the west coast of Madagascar. When the video recording of her fellow filmers showed evidence of the ray’s non-existence, Dean was convinced of the same. But her film had managed to capture what their digital recordings had not. As she found later, on developing her roll of film, the green ray “having proved itself too elusive for the pixelation of the digital world” was right there, sitting pretty on celluloid.

The artiste’s practice

Through the use of multiple exposures, masking, glass matte painting, Dean combines genres to create a multi-layered experience within the confines of one single frame. When she refers to time it is both personal and what one spends between the shooting, sorting, developing and editing of film - an almost meditative process that lets an artiste reflect and process her work.

At the talk she spoke of the tangibility and the physical touch that working with film brings asserting how “we’re all physical beings”. Stressing on the importance of semantics, she brought up the need to create a new language that would help film survive.

Dean is a master mixer of what she calls “mediums” (bypassing the use of the more commonly used media) Media, she felt, is not just a plural of the word but in fact denotes social media, the press and quite the opposite of what her process entails. Her three concurrent shows titled Tacita Dean : Landscape, Portrait and Still Life at three major London galleries – The National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts, show her work on film, photography and drawing/painting, apart from breaking down pre-assigned structures in genres related traditionally to painting and photography. Dean who plays both curator and artist at these shows, shared some of the works that juxtaposed sound against visuals, and work by old masters against contemporary artists. For her presentation in Mumbai, she shared stills from, ‘His Picture in Little’ currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery, London where images of three actors – David Warner, Ben Whishaw and Stephen Dillane who’ve portrayed Hamlet at different points in their career – are placed in a single frame as miniatures.

It would be safe to say that while Dean’s primary medium of work is film, she has hardly shied away from experimenting with a range of genres in art, including 3-D printing – an inherently digital technology.

One could say that it’s perhaps working with the “blindness” of film, where you don’t really know what you’ve captured till you see it under the scanner or in print, that gives Dean the courage to experiment, to stretch the boundaries of the medium and explore what’s beyond, to really look at even the rejects and wasted stock or “dare to take the filter off” and make mistakes. That’s where and perhaps when, as the visual artist believes, the magic truly happens.