As Christopher Nolan’s IMAX 70mm epic The Odyssey continues to play to sell-out crowds months after its initial release, there is a big-screen celluloid experience opening today in Los Angeles that deserves equal, if not greater attention: the installation simply titled FILM—which debuted in 2011 at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall—finally making its US debut at the Marciano Art Foundation, which will be showcasing until the end of February next year. It is by Tacita Dean, the British experimental filmmaker and artist, whose work is more aligned with the titan blockbuster director than meets the eye: both are steadfast in their dedication to the preservation and vitality of motion picture film and have hosted numerous talks, beginning with an event at the Getty Museum in 2015 entitled “Reframing the Future of Film,” to demand that studios and cultural organizations do all that they can to prevent the loss of this artistic medium. As eloquent as Dean has been in these and other discussions, her finest statement on the matter might be FILM, conceived after she had written an article for the Guardian that launched the movement to save celluloid. An 11-minute loop, its argument for the film strip as not only an artistic object to be celebrated in its entirety, but also one that can be displayed as its own, imposing monumental work is elusive, captivating, and entirely persuasive all at once.

Even from the numerous descriptions and pictures available online, it’s difficult to describe FILM and Marciano’s exhibition without actually being there: in the same cavernous room where the Foundation exhibited seven Bruce Conner films (on four/seven separate screens with the audience sitting in the middle) earlier this year, there is only one this time around: a thirty-one-foot-tall vertical screen looming at the back of the room like the monolith from 2001. Aside from some benches in the back, the viewer is free to roam around the space and walk up to the screen itself, and can also go up to the mezzanine, where the projection booth’s interior can be seen through a window.

In a talk at the press preview yesterday with Dean and Mark Toscano, co-curator of this exhibition and one of the preeminent American film preservationists—and my discussions with the latter, I gleaned some guideposts that might be helpful for grounding the viewer: though FILM has no title card to signal a starting or ending point, it begins with a shot of an escalator, and thereafter proceeds in three unmarked sections: roughly 8.5 minutes of color film stock (including some black-and-white images), one brief snippet lasting less than thirty seconds which I’ll get to later, and about a minute of black-and-white film stock. The collages and juxtapositions of images are almost entirely done in-camera, using then cutting-edge 3D-printed mattes and numerous iterations of filming on the same strip. As for the aspect ratio, it was accomplished by simply rotating a Cinemascope anamorphic lens 90 degrees, stretching the frame vertically rather than horizontally, resulting something like an actually viewable version of the Instagram-like frames—Dean noted that FILM was conceived and first exhibited before iPhones and the proliferation of vertical images truly became ubiquitous, though seeing them on such a wide canvas makes the experiences nearly incomparable—on the poster for Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, as noted by Vadim Rizov in the 2022 edition of his sadly defunct Filmmaker Magazine series of articles chronicling the year’s feature films shot on 35mm.

At this time, the program booklets come with a celluloid strip taken directly from a “sacrificable print” of FILM; I don’t know if those will last the entirety of the exhibition, which should be all the more reason to go see this, especially with free admission, as soon as you can. The strip proves illuminating for one aspect you may have noticed: the sprocket holes, typically used for pure functionality to guide the film through the projector, are visible on the image. On the film strip, it is apparent that there are actually two sets of sprocket holes: the outer ones are the actual functional ones, while the inner ones are images. Through a process that I readily confess to still not entirely understanding, Dean was able to construct mattes so that the camera only photographed the outside edges of the strip, allowing the image of the sprockets to be captured. The effect anticipates but entirely outdoes the now semi-common practice in some experimental and documentary films of over-scanning a film strip and keeping the sprockets: rather than demonstrating all the ways in which those digitally-scanned images are *not* being presented in their original format, FILM uses it as both a reminder of the actual tangible thing unspooling above the viewer’s heads and an aesthetic object in and of itself; Toscano mentioned to me that the mattes were even designed to create a slight drop shadow, emphasizing the dramatic nature of their effect on the images contained within them.

As for those images: much of FILM captures the towering architecture of Turbine Hall, which I wasn’t previously aware of, occasionally using that space and its many windows as containers for disjunctive images while also moving into abstract shapes and colors. Other sequences use the inverse aspect ratio to capture suitably vertical images: waterfalls, smokestacks, staircases, sometimes refilmed with separate mattes to jumble the pieces of these objects, cheekily displacing them to disrupt the viewer’s perception of a uniform towering image; there is even a virtual jump scare involving an ostrich egg that must be seen to be believed. But as intricate as the rhythmic and imagistic interplay may be—especially involving a stretch where balloons and bubbles lazily drop from the top to the bottom of the frame in a manner that could only be captured in this way with this large and vertical a screen—the effect is immediate, and more than 24 hours later I’m still marveling at the shock I felt when I stepped forward to the screen, which stretches all the way to the floor, and saw my shadow fall upon the image. In the many times I have seen my shadow on a cinema screen, it’s never been right there, where (if I felt permitted to) I could literally reach out and touch the screen on a 1:1 scale; for that sensation alone, FILM delivers an incomparable experience.

One final note, which I believe is not mentioned in the program booklet: FILM is not simply one 11-minute 35mm loop, but six laid end-to-end. The difference can be spotted in the brief interlude I mentioned earlier, a shot of mushrooms that, for its first half, is in a uniform color before shifting to black-and-white. For this exhibition, Dean and Toscano enlisted the help of a Czech film lab to hand-tint this first half of the interlude, producing an image quality entirely distinct from what surrounds it. Apparently, Dean’s preferred order is as follows: red, blue, pink, yellow, orange, and green (I myself saw the first two last); the latter was actually produced by tinting the film yellow and toning it blue. In my interpretation, this color sequence saves its most dark and vivid iterations for the two poles, though I can’t be certain about it. While I would not claim per se that this actually qualifies FILM as something that one must watch for 66 minutes—I popped in and out, only happening to stay long enough while talking with Toscano to witness every iteration; even from the lobby, the spectacle of the screen is invigorating—it only enhances the sense of this installation as a container for all that film is capable of, an argument essayed at a time when it needed it the most. As Dean writes in a essay in the booklet reflecting upon the intervening fifteen years, film is in a happier (if still precarious) place now, but the awe of FILM will never pale.