British artist Tacita Dean says she expects film director Christopher Nolan to triumph at the Oscars in March after his film about the “father of the atomic bomb” received 13 Oscar nominations.
“I’m in favor of Chris Nolan because he’s the champion of photochemical film in Hollywood. Oppenheimer is entirely shot on photochemical film; he shoots real effects and so they are more embedded in the film. He made atomic explosions photochemically; it did so with frame rate and miniature. It’s very technical,” says Dean The Journal of Art. In 2015, he appeared with Nolan at an event called Reshaping the future of cinema at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Dean remains a passionate and dedicated advocate of the continued production and use of chemical film over digital. MOVIE (2011), the first moving image commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, was his silent celebration of the masterful techniques of analogue filmmaking.
His most recent analog film piece, Geography Biography (2023), was shown at the Stock Exchange (Pinault Collection) in Paris last year. “I put a lot of energy into saving photochemical stuff and trying to preserve technical knowledge within the photochemical industry,” she says.
agree with Digital camera worldOppenheimer it was shot entirely on Imax 65mm and Panavision 65mm film using some of the highest resolution film cameras available. The 65mm Imax from the cameras was transferred to 70mm film for screening in a 70mm Imax theater (Nolan always recommended the full 70mm Imax experience to viewers).
Jack Wentworth-Weedon, events co-ordinator at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, says in a recent blog: “70mm is a must experience for film fans. It’s the quality that digital has been working towards and there is an entire industry of film effects creators who have tried to recreate his unique look.”
Dean adds: “Covid arrived and the whole cinema was in danger; people thought we didn’t need to get together to watch a movie. But you have to work hard to maintain the institution of cinema. It was always the hope that people would cross cities to see a film in 70mm. After the release of 70 mm Oppenheimerstudios are thinking of releasing more films in 70mm.
“If you’re sitting in a movie theater, the institution of cinema makes people, especially teenagers, stay there until the end and we can’t underestimate the importance of that. This is not the case with streaming. Chris is always trying to save the institution of cinema.”
Dean’s 16mm and 35mm films, blackboard drawings, photogravures, collages, sound works and found object pieces form one of the most poetic works of contemporary art, wrote Ben Luke, TAN Contributing Editor and Presenter of podcasts in 2021.
Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK, but for most of his life as an artist he lived outside of Britain, mainly in Berlin, which provided the setting for some of his most compelling work; he now resides between the German capital and Los Angeles.
