Tacita Dean's films, photographs and installations over the past 15 years have explored temporality, history and the archive; investigating the point when reality breaks away from its allotted point in space and time. The 1996 film Disappearance At Sea tells the story of a man who faked his position at sea and ultimately went mad; other 16mm films chronicle anachronisms that persist in the present: the Communist-era Fernsehturm in East Berlin, or the son of silent film actors, in Boots. In her latest film, Kodak (2006), Dean trains her camera on the last factory in Europe to produce her film stock of choice -- black-and-white film for Standard 16mm cameras. The 44-minute film was shot on the last five rolls of the stock; it is a narrative of film turning its gaze upon itself and witnessing its own demise. It premieres at Dean's mid-career retrospective, up now at the Schaulager space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, in Basel.

Additional Info
Human Treasure
KF#166: Tate Modern Talk (webcast)
KF#164: Palast
KF#171: The Sea, with a Ship, Afterwards an Island

This interview was conducted in person at Frith Street Gallery on 07/06/06.

Melissa Gronlund: Can you start by telling me about your new film, Kodak? You mentioned that the impetus came from the fact that the Kodak films were no longer being produced?

Tacita Dean: Yes. I was trying to get hold of black and white film for my 16mm camera, which is an old-fashioned camera -- that is, not up to the date of Super 16 -- which means it has perforation or sprockets on both sides as opposed to on one side, which Super 16 has. It's a double-sprocketed camera, basically a standard 16mm camera, and when I tried to get black-and-white film I was told that Kodak had stopped producing it.

MG: Are they still producing the single side 16mm film?

TD: Yes.

MG: What's the advantage of the double side?

TD: It's not to do with advantage; it's to do with different formats. All standard 16mm has sprockets on both sides. When they developed super 16mm, they used one of the sprocket sides to make more room in the frame and so create a bigger projected image. All normal projectors are standard 16; Super 16 is generally for television. They don't make it any more, black-and-white film, and actually colour is fairly doomed too. So I found five rolls in New York and I decided on a whim to think about using it to film the Kodak factory in Chalon sur Saone, at this point not knowing that they had just decided to stop all film production there. The idea of the film was to use its obsolete stock on itself. The point is that it's a medium that's just about to be exhausted. In a way I didn't understand when I started the Kodak experience just what I would get. I just had a fantasy that I would take these five rolls of black and white film and just make a small film.

MG: About their own birth...

TD: And decline in a way. Birth and death. And then when I started making enquiries I found that Kodak had actually stopped all film production in Europe and Australia. In fact the only production remains in America... When I visited the factory, I decided to make a full film because it was crazy not to, after the difficulties I had getting access. First I was sent away and eventually they said, "Well, it's closed down -- there's nothing here." So then I had to book a telephone interview with the director over a week in advance -- to have a telephone appointment! -- and we had to send them a lot of material about me. But the French are very good with artists. They have a respect for artists which many cultures -- or some cultures, like this culture -- don't have. Even in the factory all the canteens were named after artists.

MG: What was the obstacle?

TD: They'd never allowed a camera to be turned upon themselves mainly because of industrial espionage. And also it's a dark place; it's mostly red light because it's photosensitive material. Red light is safe light; the X-ray finishing was entirely red light, so it shouldn't be able to expose on a piece of film. Their stock, their emulsions are so sophisticated nowadays that the film picked up an image even in this safe light -- it was just a silhouette but you could see it on the film. And that just gives you some intimation of how much we're going to lose with digital as digital would have utterly failed there as it cannot register black.

MG: Would you ever shoot in digital?

TD: Never, no.

MG: Why not?

TD: It just doesn't interest me. No, it's more profound that that. There'll be a point probably very soon where that'll be the only thing to shoot on, and I will be faced with a dilemma as to whether to abandon the filmmaking part of my work, or to film on digital.

MG: There's a sense in which your archiving impulse -- of filming buildings before they're demolished -- has been transferred to the medium of archiving them. It's turned its lens on itself quite literally. You could read it and much of your recent work biographically -- that you're saving your own practice by recording the film.

TD: Yes. Sadly it's come to the point where I've suddenly realised that my medium is disappearing. It's a terrifying thing to realise you're going to lose your medium, because it's the medium with which I feel so utterly comfortable. It's increasingly become a standpoint of mine to fight for film; it's always been important but it's become more and more so. I've always had to fight for the correct naming of my medium. Lazy people still call it video so one has to take a stand that it is not. Video has become an easy word for any kind of moving image and I don't know why it's taken over when film was there first.

MG: You often use an anamorphic lens and you talked last night about importing false elements into your soundtrack. Would you ever speed up or slow down your film?

TD: No. Well, I have once in A Bag Of Air, where one moment is in slow motion because I could do it in the camera. But I suppose one of my favourite territories is time, even though time is a fiction in my films. Time is always a fiction in film, it's not real time. Every single aspect of the making of film is about time. It's not a passive medium -- whereas you can put a video camera in a room and with its auto focus it simply records. It's never going to be a medium of real-time observation; it's a medium of illusion and artifice, because even if you want to give the illusion of a real-time observation you have to manufacture it...

The interesting thing about the Kodak factory is that they're still making X-rays: the process is the same until the finishing. My film ends with the deserted film-packaging factory. The film shows the stunningly beautiful cycle involved in the creation of film. There's one immense building in which they put the emulsion on the film in order to sensitise it, and it has to be done in pitch-black. They only turn on the lights rarely to clean it during a shift change at night. I was trying to persuade them to let me in and then they decided on the Friday we were there that they would be doing "tests" with paper and would turn on the lights, which must have been pretty radical. The normal film was still in the machines -- nine kilometres, miles and miles of the film all the way through this immense building, and then they added paper to the film in order to keep the tension. So you have this beautiful pink film going through -- it's really stunning. The pink film travels through, all illuminated, and then suddenly they send this paper through, and it's brutal, absolutely brutal. It turns the light out, and the scene becomes totally dull and ordinary. The paper goes through and at a certain point it reaches the end of its cycle and the film comes back and suddenly the whole place is illuminated again. It's such a compelling metaphor for what we're giving up. The dullness of the digital world, the pixillated and numeric paper.

MG: I want to ask about your show that's up at the moment, at Schaulager. That's where this film is being shown for the first time?

TD: Yes.

MG: You're also showing your first sculpture? Which I think can also be read autobiographically -- you chose chalk balls because of your early chalk drawings, which you found in Madagascar [site of Diamond Ring; The Green Ray and Baobab].

TD: Well, aesthetically it's somehow very close. The thing is, when I was first invited to Schaulager, I realised there were a lot of empty walls in the space. It's quite scary. There's a social element to making art; often things are made for a particular place or situation and in Schaulager, I needed to make something for the floor. I was going to make an alabaster work on the floor, and I had these chalk balls in my studio for years, sitting on a piece of carbon paper -- which is an extremely beautiful surface; it's got a mattness which is somehow a bit like the blackboard drawings.

MG: It sounds like a photogram.

TD: It's very like a photogram, and in a way it's kind of clunky in that way. But it's got a great correlation with Diamond Ring.

MG: You were talking last night [at the Tate talk] about how you've moved from photographing dilapidated buildings to photographing people on the verge of disappearing.

TD: With Boots my desire for him wasn't so much to trap him before he disappeared -- which was more the case for my film The Uncles. It was his personality. The Serralves house is not a destroyed building, it was just being tarted up, and called for somebody to animate it. It called for someone who you couldn't quite date, historically, and Boots had that about him. And the second motivation was the way he walked. I wanted to choreograph the sound of his sticks and boot in the building.

MG: You've called him an anachronism in the past.

TD: He is an anachronism, because he doesn't really function in the contemporary world. There are a lot of people who belong to another time, but they're really on the way out. He carried with him the aura of the beginning of the last century, because of the way he was brought up -- the child of silent actors.

MG: Is he not the illegitimate son of the king?

TD: His father was -- of King George V. He looks like him, don't you think?

MG: You could describe yourself as an anachronism, with your attachment to film.

TD: Although it's becoming quite popular again. It's still the medium that keeps verisimilitude intact greater than any digital. Digital cannot touch film.

MG: At the same time so many early photographs were so beautiful because they did away with verisimilitude, because of the ways in which they were retouched.

TD: By verisimilitude, I mean the closest you can get to reproduction of the real thing. I don't mean truth. It's also that the lenses were much better. We've been accepting a compromised version of photography ever since it was invented. If you go to see any historical photographs you try to imagine a world where there is no negative, no physical object. It's going to be all these little chips; it's diabolical, so depressing.

Melissa Gronlund is based in London and is the Publications Editor for frieze. She is also a freelance writer and contributes to ArtReview, i-D and Sight & Sound among other publications.

Image © Tacita Dean
Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris