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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Infinite Rotations on a Finite Frame: A Tacita Dead Tryptich
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2006-10-01
2023-10-10
2006-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Frances Guerin
2006/10/01
University of Kent at Canterbury
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Infinite Rotations on a Finite Frame: A Tacita Dead Tryptich
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6
INFINITE ROTATIONS IN A FINITE FRAME
A TACITA DEAN TRIPTYCH1
Frances Guerin, University of Kent at Canterbury




   In his reflections on expanded cinema, cinema beyond the screen in a movie theater,
Nicky Hamlyn claims that Tacita Dean's films "construct an entirely conventional cin-
ema space within the white cube." Even though they are shown in art gallery installa-
tion, they are "more akin to straightforward cinema films, since the specificities of the
space or the sculptural implications of the projection process are not explicitly
addressed."3 Hamlyn compares Dean's films to those of, for example, Anthony McCall
(Line Describing a Cone, 1976), Neil Henderson's Black & Light Movie (2001) even Stan
Douglas' Der Sandmann (1999) in which the spectator/gallery visitor assumes an entire-
ly novel physical and conceptual relationship to the work. In turn, for Hamlyn, the
innovation of works that encourage viewers to engage with the sculptural dimensions
of the projection process as well as the projected image re-articulate the parameters of
cinema. Cinema becomes something other than a spectral image projected on a screen
before an immobile audience. It is true that Tacita Dean's films are of a different, more
conventional genre from the other candidates in Hamlyn's chapter on "Installation and
Its Audience." Dean's films may be looped, but they are still projected as images on a sin-
gle, two-dimensional screen. Nevertheless, this does not mean that they create an "an
entirely conventional cinema space within the white cube."4
   In this article, I argue that when three of Dean's films - Disappearance at Sea (1996),
Fernsehturm (2001), and Disappearance at Sea II (1997) - were displayed at the Tate
Britain in 2001 as a triptych, they issued a challenge to the conventional parameters of
cinema, if only by virtue of their exhibition as a triptych in an art museum. The three
films, both individually and as a triptych, explore the line that both demarcates cinema
from painting specifically, and that between moving and still images more generally. In
addition, the placement of these films in an art museum challenges their audience to
interrogate viewing practices of both static and moving images, in art museums and
movie theaters. These conflicts and provocations begin with Dean's characteristic
exploration of edges, margins - the edge of the world, horizon lines seen from vantage
points of obscurity, spaces and places that are themselves abandoned, forgotten, yet for
Dean, replete with relevance to and meanings for our historical present. And the mar-
ginal space that is her primary concern: the edges of the film images produced by the
anamorphic lenses attached to her camera.
  All of these confrontations at the margins fuel the films' central engagement with dis-
courses on the parameters of vision at the end of the 2oth century, a vision constrained
by the technologies that were once thought to enable it. By examining edges and divid.
ing lines between different media, between different spaces and different temporal
dimensions, Dean's films encourage reflection on our conventional viewing habits in

CINEMA & Cie, no. 8, Fall 2006                                                       119
and out ofthe movie theater, in and out of the art gallery. The vision explored by Tacita
Dean is a complicated phenomenon: it is human vision colored by cinematic sision
institutionalized vision, and that produced by the art gallery: Thus, the films may no
"expand" cinema according to Hamlyn's notion of the genre, but they do expa
existing conceptions of the medium.
 Disappearance at Sea(19g6) charts the fall of night as it is refracted in the French leas
es of the St Abb's lead Lighthouse in Bensickshire. The film alternates between the
camera'stight close up, I want to say loving. vision of the light bulbs in or hit, and the
vicw out to sea, that is, what is seen by the bulbs. This sicw out to sea ako include
bulbs in the left hand corner of the anamorphically shot frame. The film comprises
seven static long takes: thrce of the light bulbs and three corresponding visions out to
sea, cach one step further into the sun's progressive setting, cach one step closes to
nightfall than the previous shot. In the seventh and final static image of Disappraranis
at Sea, Dean's camera watches the beam of the lighthouse su cop dramatically across the
darkened ocean. The image is almost black and the search of the light creates an
abstract pattern on the wiles of the night sea. As the movements of camera, lights, and
the disappearing sun mark the shift from day into night, we begin to recognize
Disappcarance at Sca as a film about light and darkncss including the conflicts and har
monies of natural and technological light. The various lights - natural light. that of the
lighthouse, and the camera - demarcate the interstice of the castline and the horizon
and in addition, logether they mirror the interstice of the indefinable temporal
moment between day and night.
 Where Dean's films discourse on the shift from the diurnal to the noctumal, there is
always the implication of another clision: an clision between the temporality of tech
nology and the temporality of nature. In the case of Disappearance at Sea, the technol
ofy of the lighthouse rotates in apparent motion toward infinity: However, unlike the
cycles of nature, the lighthouse apparatus will he switched off, at the arrival of the neat
day, and finally, when a new technological invention replaces it. At the intersection of
the temporal interstice between Jay and night and that between technology and
nature, Dean's camera inscribes its reflections on the vision (and blindness) that these
lights enable and delimit. Lastly; the interrogation of the limen of day turning into
night, of the friction between technology and nature are underlined and further probed
by the soundtrack. As night falls, the hawking of gulls on the soundtrack becomes loud
er, contrary to our expertations.
  The other side panel of Dean's triptych as it was exhibited by the Tate Britain,
Disappearance at Scall does not watch the light of the lighthouse, it becomes synony
mous with it. Rather than the seven still frames of Disappearance at Sea, Disappearancs
at Sea ll is one continuous take. The camera itself remains static, and it depends on the
rotations of the lighthouse apparatus for its motion. It thereby offers the same
panoramic view of the infinite blue sea in rotation that is seen by the light. This film is
shot in daylight at the Longstone Lighthouse in the Fare Islands, Northumberland. In
Dispacarance at Sea ll the interface hetween nature and technology is not matched by
the transition from day to night, from sunlight to searchlight, but rather, by the inten
sity of the sun's reflection on the glass that separates the light bulbs from the sun. Is
the sun slowly sets the reflation of the technological lights on the glass intensifies la
audition, the light of the film missen sere intensifies and diminishes in keeping with
the camera's position in relation to the sun. The blue of the sky and the sea becomes
                                                       INFINITE ROTATIONS IN A FINITE FRAME


dull when the sun is behind the light house apparatus and the camera in their rotation.
Thus, we are reminded of the synchronization of technology and nature in Dean's film:
cach compensating the other's fluctuations as they appear in the frame. But we are also
reminded of the asynchronization of technology and nature in Dean's film: the rela-
tionship is one of uncase in which the rhythmical patterns of film and lighthouse tech-
nology cannot be equated with the unpredictability and organic motions of nature.
   Fernschturm is the centerpiece of the gallery installation and, as such, adds an his-
torical dimension to the side panels. Without Fernsehturm, the two Disappearance at
Sca films might be understood as ventures into the imagination of the romantic wan-
derer. Dcan explains that Disappearance at Sea captures the dreams and ambitions, the
human fallibility and insanity of Donald Crowhurst, a British explorer who set sail in
a race to circumnavigate the world in 1968.5 Crowhurst feigned success through spuri-
ous radio reports, when in reality, his boat never made it into the Atlantic.
Disappearance at Sca I was apparently inspired by an extract from the 12th century.
 Tristan and Isoldc. Having been wounded in a duel, Tristan also surrenders himself to
the providence of the sea. He hopes to find a cure from the Queen of Ireland. Unlike
Crowhurst, his journey is not bound to technology and it is successful. Tristan's is a
journey of healing, rescue and redemption as the heavens guide him to his destiny. To
incorporate Tristan's surrender to the sea and its contingencies, Disappearance at Sea II
is subtitled Voyage de Guerison (journey of healing). The subtitle refers to an ancient
Celtic belicf which holds that surrender to the forces of the sea will guide one to a mag-
ical island where supernatural forces will heal all misfortune.? Without Dean's expla
nation, the two Disappearance at Sea films are about the sun, the moon, the sea, the sky
and their dynamic interaction with the film camera, mechanized light. Even though
Crowhurst's journey on the "Teignmouth Electron" is imbricated with all manner of
technological inventions, including his own, his ship has disappeared from the beam
of the light house seen in the image and the short wave radio heard on the soundtrack
of Disappearance at Sea and Disappearance at Sea II. Similarly, the anguish of
Crowhurst's story is balanced by the liberation of the Celtic journey. Thus, both sides
of Dean's representation remain steeped within the Romantic. The invitation to iden-
tify as the Romantic wanderer alone at sea on a voyage of self-discovery that might ulti-
mately enhance human understanding is simply passed on to us as the viewer of
 Dean's films.
   Another possible interpretation of Disappearance at Sea and Disappearance at Sea II
 comes from their juxtaposition with Fernsehturm: as philosophical reflections on the
 nature of vision at the intersection of technology and nature. Fernsehturm potentially
 anchors the contemplation of these natural and technological phenomena in the his-
 torical world. Anchor is perhaps the wrong word. The films balance precariously on an
 historical and geographical edge. The Fernsehturm of the title is at the edge of the
 world. It is a structure that belongs to a world that still treads the line between Cold
 War no man's land, or refuge, and political center of one of zist century Europe's most
 powerful member states. Unlike the lighthouses that haunt the margins of time and
 space, the radio tower is in the world: it sits on Alexanderplatz, at the center of Berlin,
 like Dean's representation of it sits at the center of the triptych. The lighthouses of
 Disappearance at Sea and Disappearance at Sea I are at the center of nowhere, appro-
 priately relegated to edges. The Fernsehturm, a one-time icon of technology and
 progress in Socialist Germany is now a tourist curiosity with a revolving restaurant at

                                                                                       121
FRANCES GUERIN




the top. As a tourist attraction it is once again a central feature of the post war Berlin
cityscape. The lighthouses stand like specters of another world that few even know
about, let alone venture to sce.
  As the centerpicce of the triptych, fernschturm also draws out its similaritics to that
which it binds. These similarities point up the historically ground dimensions of
Disappcarance at Sea and Disappearance at Sea Il. Once the measure of the all seeing.
surveillant ye of power, the Fernschturm was and continucs to be. like the light house.
a guiding light, a tower on the horizon that orients those in its midst. Like the sadio
tower, the light tower becomes an anachronism: an icon of technological progress, free
dom, mobility. the dream of omniscience. But, it is only a dream. Like the horizon
watched by the Fernschturm, the lighthouse simultancously offers a routiniz.cd, finite.
and intransigent illumination, an illumination dependent on the fixity of the rotations.
Like the Fernschturm, the lighthouses chosen by Dean sit at the coge of the world, in a
no man's land, a relic of times long gone, a world that no longer matters.? And ct, while
the world illuminated by the scarchlight may not be pivotal to the political and histor.
ical identity of unified Germany and Europe, it is still crucial to the ships it guides in
the night. It is absolutely central to the lives it protects. Through their intimate re
tons with Fernschturm as triptych centerpicce, the Disapycarance at Sc a films are both
abstract philosophical meditations as well as material gestures or representations of an
otherwise forgotten world that has an impact on our own time and place. Similarly, typ
ical of Dan's interest in technologics of different eras, the lighthouses draw attention
10 the Ferschturm as a technology of the past: it is, like them, historically displaced. All
three were once seen as ahead of the times inventions that are now cyesores of the
past. Seen in this light, the triptych encapsulates both the possibilities and (past)
hopes cabled by technologics designed to fortify and expand our experience, and par
ticularly, our visual experience of the world. Through this journey to the edge of the
world, and back again, away from and toward the lighthouse, as we experience the trip.
lych in installation, we are also reminded of the restrictions imposed by these same
technologies in their interaction with nature. their engagement with different tempo-
ralitics. And the restrictions of the paths they illuminate, the visual trajectories they
cnable. First, however, a description of Fernschturmi.
  Fernschturm is the longest of the three films, and like the others, takes place in an
Interstitial temporal moment, a transition marked by the sun's mutations from yellow
lo orange to red to purple to deep blue and finally black as it is seen through the win-
dow pancs of the revolving restaurant. Like the measured movements of the camera in
the Disappearance at Sca films, the rotations of Fernschturm are in complete concert
with the slow revolve of the restaurant. The longer time frame of the film is determined
by the concrete measurement of the length of time taken by the diners in the restau
rant. The film opens as they arrive and ends once they depart for the night. At 44 min
utes however, the film also undoes this equation by revealing a discrepancy between
the time taken to perform the pro filmic events and that of their filmic representation.
In addition, despite the apparent synchrony between the movement of the restaurant,
what the camera sees and the setting of the sun, through its placement in a tript
which continually challenges order and harmony, the restaurant may follow a struc
tured path of revolution, but, it simultaneoulsy rotates towards its obsolescence. This
one time bastion of socialist potency that boasted the most sought after dining experi
ence in East Berlin is now no more than a tourist novel a Sentially. Forschturm also
                                                        INFINITE ROTATIONS IN A FINITE FRAME


follows a similar logic to that of the two side panels. Once again, the camera remains
static with all movement taking place within the frame - here the diners drifting in and
out, and staff preparing orders, and waiting tables. Likewise, the camera shifts between
a number of positions: from the galley at the pivotal core of the rotating restaurant
looking out at the diners and the sky beyond; to somewhere on the perimeter looking
in at the staff as they prepare to deliver food and drink. 12
   Fernschturm both mirrors and is mirrored by the cycles of nature in their interface
with technology seen in the two side panels. As well as seeing in the round, the three
films look inwards (at the power of technological light) and outwards (to the horizon
line of nature) and vice versa when they "document" the shift from day into night,
blindness and insight, the internal and the external experience of being human in a
world observed, framed, followed, guided and routinized by technological light, tech-
nological time, technological images. We watch the diners - and by extension ourselves
- mesmerized by the view outside the window as well as the view of the brilliant yel-
 low, orange, and red sun on the window. We see them look at as well as into the image
 before them: they watch the reflections of color on the windows as well as what lies on
  the other side, presumably the city beyond. Like the diners as audience, we watch the
 surface of Dean's films as they engage reflexively with their own status as image, and
 simultaneously are fascinated by what lies before these images, on their other side.
Thus, the vision of the diners is returned to the mechanical eye of the camera (what we
see) which, in turn, creates a perceptual experience that is duplicated by the human eye
(our act of seeing as film viewers). In this way, Fernsehturm eloquently, even figurally,
represents our viewing process as it is explored in the triptych. Disappearance at Sea
and Disappearance at Sea II draw attention to the process of looking at and through
both the glass of the light house and the filmic image via the negotiation of different
modes of light on glass, mirror and film screen. While in Ferneshturm the process is lit-
eralized if we see the diners as our onscreen surrogates. The longer we look at the three
works both singularly and in unison, the more complicated the discourse on vision.


 Defining Cinema

   When the eye of the camera looks left and right, and when the three films look to
 each other for meaning and justification as a triptych, they reflect on the medium of
 cinema. It is a cinema defined via the meaning of painting or still images in a gallery
 context as well as by the technologies that define its aesthetic. The trafficking between
 margin and center, the exploration of times and spaces on the edge and at the core of the
 cultural and social world in all three pieces, is reflected back in Dean's examination of
 the limits of cinema, the limits demarcated by the frame, the limits of the form of the
 medium. Always in her work Dean interrogates the role of technology in its interface
 with the natural cycles of the sun, the earth, the moon as they rotate around one anoth
 er. And, by default, this interrogation is enmeshed with the parallel but always dis-
 crepant temporalities identifiable in Dean's films: the time of nature, technology, art
 and socio-historical time are in constant play. These discourses of time and space merge
 to reflect on the implications of the co-existence of technology and nature. Where tech-
 nology has no limits, for example, in the infinite rotation of the lighthouse, or the rev-
 olution of the restaurant at the top of the Fernsehturm, nature imposes its limits: the

                                                                                        123
114160 v66.4


finitude of a day, marked by the fall of night. And this relationship between technolozy
and nature is reversible the three films have a beginning and end, the camera can oh
see so far, technological light is bound by the power of its beam. The finitude of the cin
ema -the medium that supposedly gamers its power from the ability to transcend time
and space, to disregard the confines of the static image - is thus underlined when cos
fronted by the infinite expanse of the sea, the inestimable and inimitable light of the
sun. Accordingly, through the cycles of nature, we begin to see the limits and limitles:
ness of the cinema. We notice its edges.
 The constraints of a medium commonly celchrated in avant garde circles for is
potential to liberate human vision from the limitations imposed by gravity, history and
corporeality are further explored in these three films through the nurturing of a ten
sion between motion and stillness." Where we cxpect motion - the moving image -
Dean gives us stasis, and where we commonly anticipate stillness, Ucan finds objects in
motion: the pivot of the lighthouse beam, the revolving restaurant. And of course, the
static film camera is then set in motion when it is attached to these obicts in rotation.
Here, the technology of the cinema - itself an anachronism in a world of digital and
cyber images - comes face to face with technologics that were also once at the cutting
edge when they were invented. The cinema as technology mirrors the nostalgic prom
ise of now obsolete technologies. As Clarrie Wallis notes, Dan chooses technol
that evoke loss, unrealized optimism and disillusionment. As Wallis says, the light
house comes from a time when science and technology were believed to have the poten
tial to conquer all. The lighthouse is one of those remarkable inventions bound to free.
dom, exploration, discovery and domination that was to be the result of sailing the
oceans. The Fernschturm is not so different: it remains the symbol for a post-War opti
mism and social fortitude. The imbrication of cinema with these curiously outdated
yet ahead -of- their time machines, invites us to reflect further on the parameters of film
 -potentially ossified in the art muscum. How is the cinema "reminiscent" of a promise
of utopia that was never realized? A belief nowhere held so strongly as in the avant
garde on which Dean draws for inspiration.



Cinema and Painting

  Side by side with the confrontation between technology and nature in Dean's films, is
the tussle between cinema and painting. This relationship exposes a different set of lim:
its of the cinema aesthetic. In the filmic triptych, there is both an intimacy, a binding
logether at the edges of cinema and painting, and a mutual challenge to each other's
identity. Like that set in motion between technology and nature, the struggle between
cinema and painting is at the heart of Dean's reflection on how we see in Disappearance
at Sea, Dissppearance at Sea Il and Fernsehturm. The reflexive use of cinema as an
object in installation, cinema in its relation to painting opens up a new level of under.
standing, not only of cinematic perception, but also of human perception. The affinity
between Dean's seascapes and those experienced by the Romantic wanderer in Caspar
David Friedrich's visions at the edge of the world, in an interstitial moment as day turns
into night, such as the Monk by the Sea (1809) has been remarked upon by others.!* The
most profound coincidence comes, I would argue, in the affinity between Friedrich's
wanderes and Dean's viewer. This coincidence is both the evidence of a viewer at odds
                                                       INFINITE ROTATIONS IN A FINITE FRAME


with the conventional cinema viewer and of the triptych's exploration of modes of
vision produced at the interface of technology and nature. Like the monk by the edge of
the sea engulfed by the transparent light of daybreak, the viewer of Dean's films is invit-
ed to explore her own film viewing practices away from the clamor of every day life,
away from the popcom, the exit signs, the other distractions of the movie theater. We
are invited to contemplate. And we contemplate a vision, a vision that is deeper and
more penctrating than any we would experience in the cinema: the reach of this vision
is given us by the boundless elements that mesmerize us - the sea, the sun, the infinite
turning of the restaurant, the light mechanisms, the repetitive beat of the camera appa-
ratus as it turns on the pivot to which it is attached.
   We are also connected to the viewer of Friedrich's wanderer as well as to the monk
himself, when we are thrown back on the limits of our vision. The viewer of The Monk
by the Sca is confronted by the flatness of the painted surface. It is a foreshortened per-
spective of the horizon in which a luminescent sky, sea and sand coexist in the fore.
ground of the image, on the surface of the painting. When this tendency of drawing
attention to the surface of the image is transposed to Disappearance at Sea Il and
Fernsehturm, Dean's static camera in close up foregrounds not the translucence of
paint as light, but technology in abstraction: mirrors, bulbs, glass, steel frames and gird-
ers. These obstructions to our sightlines throw our eye back onto the surface
image, they cloud our vision, reminding us of its limitations. It is as two dimensional as
the other works by which it is surrounded in the Tate Britain.
  The drawing attention to the apparatus of cinema and the sibling technologies which
enable it in Dean's films also connects the triptych to the history of cinema. Again,
examination of this relationship points up a challenge to the conventions of film view-
ing. Dean's films are most notably kindred to the structural films of Michael Snow.
Again, this connection is so obvious that other critics have pointed it out.15 But the sig-
nificance of the connections is complex and not yet fully explored. Like Snow's films,
Dean's interrogate both the mechanized nature of cinematic vision and our physical
and conceptual experience of this vision. Like La Region centrale (1971), Wavelength
(1967), Back and Forth (1969), Dean's films are about the cinema's ontology stripped
bare: they demonstrate and interrogate the parameters of camera movement. And the
movement is always given richness and profundity through changes in light, color, tex-
ture, perspective, focal length, and mise-en-scene. that is, through attributes that
belong to the image itself, the four sides of which are the object of our vision. With lit
tle to no regard for human figures, or for cinematic conventions of continuous time,
space and motion, Disappearance at Sea and Disappearance at Sea II, Fernsehturm
regard the limitations and possibilities of technological modernity, technological
vision, and our vision as it is inflected by these technologies. The movements of these
cameras in concert with apparatuses to which they are otherwise unrelated encourages
our eye to meditate on the image of the sea, the beauty of nature. Then, as the pieces
progress, our eye is increasingly focused on the movement of the camera. This shift
which takes place somewhere across the course of each film, but is never tied to a sin-
gle identifiable moment, articulates that our vision is simultaneously stymied by the
limitations of the technologies on which it depends. Our vision is bound to the infinite
rotations of the lighthouse apparatus, the radio tower and the camera, and is thus, slave
to the unrelenting repetitions and routines of mechanization. This is also the difference
between Snow's films and those of Tacita Dean made thirty years later.

                                                                                        125
PRANCES GUERIN



  The relationship to Snow's cinema is instructive for its distinction as well as its com
 nection. Unlike the arbitrary motions of Snow's camera in La Région centrale. an arbi
 trariness derived at the intersection of the camera and the Snow made device on which
 it rotates, the revolutions in can's films are calculated, fixed, without any possibility
 of aleatory incursions. Thus, although mesmerizing, the camera dossn't allow us to
 fully indulge in the dreams of either Crowhurst or Tristan, or the monk at the cds el
 the sea. And neither do the regimented rotations that result from attaching the camera
 lo the necessarily predictable mechanics of a lighthouse light or the core of a rotating
 restaurant allow for the ricting three and a half hour meditative journcy into the poss
 sibilities of cinema as docs la Region central.
   Dean's triptych of films as art works in installation opens out onto a world in which
 vision - both that of the human and the cinematic eye - are cndless and constrained,
 generative and stultifying. llowever, een though the films cable a sensuous vision
 that has clear limitations, Disappearance at Sca, Disaguscaramer at Scall, Ternschturm
 do not constrain the viewer in the idcological sense that a narratise cinema narrows or
 manipulates our focus on conservative moral valucs. The defined parameters of cinc
 matic vision appcar to remain within the sensuous realm. Critical to this distinction is
 the fact that Dean's films do not create times and spaces that proffer an illusory cohe
 sion. They may invite us to contemplate and to dicam, but never to be believed in their
 own plenitudc. We are saved this indulgence through the constant clatter of the appa
 ratus in motion, the blinding light of the sun or the light bulbs as they arc left to shine
 directly into Dean's camera lens as they do before the camera. Dean's work reflects on
 the possibilities of the cinema and the vision it enables - not the visions it imagines -
 as an art form. And it achieves through simultancously drawing attention to its aes
 thetic two dimensionality and the parameters of its motion. It sits, in effect, at the inter.
 lace of painting and cinema. like Friedrich's monk, Snow's camera in La Region cen
 trale and the cinema in installation, the triptych sits on the edge of two worlds, centered
 and balanced by displacement to the margins.



 The Sea in Painting and Cinema

   Although the sea has figured in film throughout the 2oth century - most notably in ear
 andexperimental films that explore the symergy of nature and technology in motion, it has
 not been the recurring motif, some might say, the persistent preoccupation that it has in
 painting and photography! Because the representation of the sea is usually linked to
 notions of contemplation of a world through a static frane. As such the sea has been
 invoked in discourses on the boundlessness of being human in a finite world and vice
  versa These are issues that have not traditionally been of primary concern to the cinema.
 They are, however, consistently taken up in painting from the Enlightenment onwards. In
 particular, the sca as a representational figure becomes central to the work of modemist
 painters who are interested in the confrontation between stasis and movement, figure and
 ground, and the challenge to the creation of a diminishing point perspective in modemity:
 Ukan's work engages with these discourses on the circumscription of the sea by the static
 frame. She cunvinces us that the modernist issues of composition, the finitude of vision,
 the possibility of gaining a God like view of the world, are indeed, the province of the cin
 sma: the sea is a space, a ph enomenon here cinema, art and human vision intersect.
                                                        INFINITE ROTATIONS IN A FINITE FRAME


  Like the challenge to the certitude of representation in modernist versions of the sea,
the rotations of the light house, the revolving restaurant and Dean's camera share the
departure from the privileged linear perspective seen in Renaissance painting.
However, unlike modernist painters such as Mondrian, Cézanne, and so on, rather than
focusing on surface flatness of the painted image, Dean's camera, the light of the light-
house, the rotating mechanism of the restaurant all see in the round. This different way
of seeing through the foregrounding of technology - literally - discovers the sea as a fig-
 ure through which to explore human vision anew. Dean's discovery echoes those
modes of vision cxplored in the late 19th, early oth century through modernist paint-
ing and other technologies (including cinema). 17 But first, to the relationship between
the triptych and its art historical antecedents.
    Beyond the obvious connection to romantic wanderers and the conceptual concerns
of painted representation, the figure of the sea binds Deans work to the long tradition
of art that explores the organization of perception through depictions of nature. We are
reminded of Mondrian's navigation of the relationship between painting and nature in
works such as The Sea (1912), Sea, Pier and Ocean (1914). Here, like Dean after him,
 Mondrian interrogates the surface and depth, horizontality and verticality, of his can-
vas through expression of the endless interplay of the stasis of the horizon with the
dynamic swelling of waves. He pits the finitude of his frame, of line, the crudity of his
palette and compositions together with the infinity, the purity, the sublimeness of the
sea. For painters such as Mondrian, the representational challenge posed by the sea
came in its mystical and harmonious significance in a technological world in which the
planar and surface were of primary importance. Like Dean in his wake, Mondrian is
 interested in representing the changes to vision as a result of the social and cultural
changes outside its frame. And his foremost concern is to negotiate the influence of
these changes on representation. However, as I have interpreted it, for Dean, the
changes brought about by new technologies of seeing are inscribed in the representa-
 tional practice itself when the production of the image visibly depends on the rotating
 light of the light house and the revolve of the Fernsehturm.
   The concerns of Lyonel Feininger perhaps come closer to the fractured, stilted nature
 of human vision explored in Dean's films. Again, in works such as the two Clouds above
 the Sca (1923), Calm at Sea, 1, II, III (1929). The Baltic: V Cloud (1946/47) we see
 Feininger turn to nature, particularly the sea, the sun, the sky and the horizon line as
 primers for an architecture of space on canvas. And like, but unlike Dean's triptych, the
created spaces and pictorial compositions are dictated by the power of light as Feininger
finds it in nature. He again is interested in the dwarfed human, indistinguishable or
absent against the monumental laws of nature in its midst. But the angularity of the
compositions, the flatness of Feininger's surface lays bare the primacy he also gives to
the pictorial invention or recreation of light, air and water. Feininger's representations
of the sea enable us to see nature in a different way, just as nature enables a new way of
seeing the fragmented architectonics of the world around us. And there is no mistaking
that for Feininger, these breaks with representational convention are the result of tech-
nological rationalization. Dean takes up similar concerns, only in a different medium
as I have described above.
  The line of Tacita Dean's ancestry goes on, and I could continue - Rothko's "iconogra-
phy of color" views of the world from the edge of the sea looking out to the horizon.
Beyond the connections created by the sea, as Friedrich Meschede notes, Dean's
                                                                                        92?
 FRASCES GULAY



 resonate with the lonely, landscapes and cityscapes in the canvases of Edward Hope
 (Solitary Figure in a Theater, 1902-04; Lighthouse Mill. 1927: Two Lights Villagc, 19294
 canvases which again depict places and spaces on the edge, forgotten, or determined to
 be inconsequential. I The cold, emptiness of the canvas, the traces of human charactes
 who inhabit lives on the edge, at odd times of day bear a remarkable resemblance 16
 Dean's lonely, repetitive, and sometimes chillingly nostalgic depictions of worlds tha
 have been forgotten, or were perhaps never acknowledged. And for Dcan, these times
 and places that appear beyond the pale of everyday life, are in fact, central to the def
 nition of being human. In these times and places we are confronted with limits that, in
 tum, bring us face to face with our own sphere of possibility, particularly as it is ho
 stered by our engagement with technology, and our participation in icchnological
 vision.
  The Enlightenment celebrated the looking outwards, from on high, from the lisht
 house out over the sea. Such representations marked a transition to the centrality of the
individual as being bestowed with god like vision. from above and beyond. for Tacita
Dean and early 2oth century modern artists concerned with the changing modes of per
ception enabled by technological modernity, the sea is in dynamic struggle with tech
nology. The plenitude and harmony of the natural world have taken on a different
meaning once they are viewed through the eyes of zoth century modcrity. for
Mondrian, Feininger, and Rothko, the play of light on the surface, the movement of the
waves on the breakwater offer the opportunity to explore the struggle between the hor
izontal and the vertical, the geography of the picture plane. Through this reduction of
the great expanse of the sca to its most essential pictorial form, modernist artists appro
priate it as a figure in their historical explorations. This reminds us of the limitations to
our assumed omniscience in a technologically inflected environment.
  However, Dean's work also eschews both the Romantic and the modernist intimacy
with the sea, especially as they are concerned to explore the sublime and the profundi
ty of human emotion. Dean's concern coincides more with the shared interest in the
physicality of the sca - its infinite horizon line as the measure of the finitude of human
vision. And when the sea and the horizon line are coupled with the technologies
through which they are seen - the light, the camera. the radio tower - Dean's works
fully embraces the physicality of this experience. The three films underline the diff
culty of orienting ourselves without help in the face of the vastness of nature. The
human eye can only see so far. And when we turn for help. to technology, the promise
is unfulfilled: the technology does not - unlike the lighthouse - enable us to establish
a precise location, to calculate the course we are on, to guide us around the signposts of
civilization. It does not light our way.
  Our view of the Fernsehturm, that is, of the diners' view from on high, reminds us
that, despite its promise, technology does not offer omniscience. To reiterate, we are left
looking at a reflection of ourselves as the world passes by on the other side
ror. The inclusion of Fernschturm enables this discourse on blindness and insight, the
finitude and infinity of human vision - bolstered by the machine - to be lifted to a polit
ical or historical level, at times one colored by confusion and contradiction. We see be
cons of surveillance, metaphors of loss, uncertain destinations, and u
unties in the humdrum sistence of a world that no lo
mond sis nerethelessa source of tascination or noons
world they neves experienced. like a the vie
                                                          INFINITE ROTATIONS IN A FINITE FRAME


 Disappearance at Sea, Disappearance at Sea II, and Fernsehturm is thrown into exile,
transported to a place at the edge of the world where he/she is invited to dream, but
only for so long. Before long, we are left with nothing more than the surface of the
image and the patterns thereon created as the camera turns on its prosthetic pivots, as
the sun sets and as the world outside becomes slowly divorced from that on the inside.
Ultimately, thus, the historical lessons are overwhelmed by the immediacy of the tech-
nological apparatuses.
  My point is madc, Dean takes up the horizon, structures at the edge of the world, inde-
finable, ineffable times, and empties them of all human actors before infusing them
with the play of color and light, surface and depth, the stasis of composition in struggle
with the dynamism of nature, and turns all of these relationships inside out in order to
reflect on the same qualities in the historical world. In particular, the triptych reflects
on cinematic vision, on our vision. Both the technological and the human versions of
vision carved out by our experience of these films become symbolic of the loneliness,
the haunted promises, the emptiness of how and what we see in the present. And this
eventual significance of Dean's films is realized through their complex interaction with
painting, their placement next to each other and, in turn, their situation in the art
museum. As we reflect on the similarities and differences within the art historical tra-
jectory invoked by the triptych, the struggle between the static and the moving image,
what the films do, and what they strive for, then we begin to realize that the three films
are given new meaning as a triptych in the Tate Britain.


The Panorama

  Dean's films belong to pictorial traditions other than those mapped out by the art
museum. However, when placed in these contexts, we are led back to the same concerns
with the simultaneous liberation and entrapment of the technologies that fuel our ori-
entation. Typical of their occupation of different fields of possibility, the films' status as
360 degree images creates an intertext with the 18th- and 19th-century panorama. As has
been well-documented, the panorama as a form of bourgeois entertainment was another
invention of modernity and an important contribution to the business of pleasure that
developed hand in hand with the rationalization of time, space, work and play.19 The
panorama, sibling to the diorama and other forms of modern entertainment was also a
form of education, where school children were taken to learn - as they are taken to the
Tate Britain. And it was a place that gentrified people could go on Sundays, again, like the
cinema at the turn of the 2th century and, moreover, like the Tate Britain at the turn of
the zist century. Thus, Dean's contemporary versions of the 18th- and 19th-century
panorama resonate with ongoing discourses on film and other visual cultures, not just
painting. In turn, the dynamic exchange between Dean's films, the art gallery and the
panorama as a form of popular culture open up further interstitial times and spaces, illu-
minate still more coincidences, conjunctions and connections within the triptych.
  In his comprehensive study of the panorama, Stephen Oettermann reminds us that
the panorama had and continues to have a dual function: it liberates and imprisons
human vision.20 These compelling vistas-in-the-round of fictional scenes - especially
historical battles, crucifixions, cities, and like Dean's panoramic views, landscapes, and
voyages at sea - enable the viewer to stand, god-like at the center of the rotunda and sur.

                                                                                          129
FRANCES GUERIN



vey the 36o degree scene from above. The visitor to the panorama saw from a position
of omniscience, through an eye that was not limited by the vanishing point perspective
afforded by a static two-dimensional image. The panoramic images are static and
through the motion of narrative, they are also dynamic. Just like the images in the cin
ema. Indeed, Dean's films have much in common with the grand sweep of panoramic
representation. Like the filmed image whose scams are exposed via the window frames
of Fernsehturm, any film is a collection of discrete still images, and a serics of fat
images that unfold before an immobile spectator to give the impression of motion, and
the delusion of omniscience. And again, like the panorama. Dean's images paint cxpan
sive scenes - a struggle (between natural and technological light) played out on the
waves of the sea, and the vast cityscape of Berlin as day turns into night.
  Another coincidence between the different forms of the panorama and the cinematic
visions of Disappearance at Sca, Disappearance at Scall and Feruschturm is the
 "omnivoyant" gaze embracing an expansive subject matter that is offered by all of
them. Following this logic, Dean's camera substitutes for the static spectator at the con
ter of the panoramic apparatus. As Oettermann notes, the perspective of omnipotence
and omniscience is double edged. Because it is an apparatus that also encloses onc's
view," the panorama might give the impression of mastery over the world, but is, in
fact, in the business of immobilizing the viewer. The viewer is placed as a pisod, in a
position of servitude, even slavery to the tyranny of power. we may think that we have
complete, unlimited mastery over the vision before us. However, this is the deception
which places us as the instrument of power and authority. For Octtermann, the panora
ma is, to use Marx's phrase, "pregnant with its contrary". the panopticon.
  As I have begun to argue, like the panorama, Dean's images are also intent upon
exposing the illusion of the all secing cyc, an exposure created
and moving images. In Disappearance at Sea and Disappearance at Sea llour vi
the sea is limited, limited by the light - we only see what the sun allows us to sce. When
night falls, the narrative is given us by the movement of the beam of the lighthouse.
Similarly, we only see what the construction of the machine wants us to sce. Although
Dean places her camera in a position of omniscience, there is no pretense that this van
lage point offers a god-like view. Our perspective is limited - the abstraction of the
machinery blocks our view as do the four sides of the image to which we are beholden.
Yes, we are invited to contemplate the view, but we can only contemplate for so long.
Our attention is drawn to the limits of the frame, the brilliance of the light, the work
ings of the apparatus.
 Dean's films also foreground the illusion through their content: for the visitor to the
panorama, the distortion of one's place in the circular space was created by the painted
circularity and the overshelming envelopment of the spectator's physical existence.
Similarly, the images were painted such that the space between surface and spectator
was dissolved, giving the effect of a trompe-l'oeil. For Dean's spectator, the disorienta
tion is introduced through the absence of establishing shots. Quite simply, we are set to
find our way on the same ocean of possibility and false expectation as Donald
Crowhurst and Tristan. The difference being that while their journeys must navigate
the interface of human limitations and the sea, Dean's spectator navigates the interface
betwicen nature and technology, particularly. the technology of the cinema. Thu
Crowhurst and Tristan can engage in a mythmaking journey toward enligh
we set adrift to wander, but we are also curtailed by the constraint
                                                       INFINITE ROTATIONS IN A FINITE FRAME


viewing experience. These constraints are provided by the apparatus of film when wed
ded to those of the light house.
 When ground in the historical world of Berlin 2001 from the top of the Fernsehturm,
we are also reminded that any position of omniscience is only ever an illusion, that we
are always watched. In Cold War Berlin, the radio tower could be seen from all over the
city, but it also symbolized the impossibility of escape from the all-seeing eye of politi
cal surveillance. While surveillance was usually carried out by best friends, wives, co-
workers and neighbors acting as invisible informants, the image of the Fernschturm
was a symbol of these otherwise invisible sightlines. These references to other perspec-
tives in the round, together with the films' attention to the parameters of their surface
asthetic, underline the limitations of a vision dependent on technological invention.
Similarly, once we recall that Dean's representations capture places and spaces of the
past, the Janus-face of vision enabled by technological apparatuses becomes even clear-
er. The places and objects of Dean's films are outdated, perhaps even irrelevant to our
contemporary historical knowledge. So we are left with the question: over what are we
and the camera omniscient? All we can know is that we too are limited by our histori-
cal frame. Thus, our relationship to the three films is complicated, paradoxical even.
We are spatially and temporally, conceptually and physically free to explore, and yet,
we are also trapped, our dreams stymied - simultancously.
 For all the sensuous mobility given us by the camera and objects in motion, our phys-
ical relationship to the films is closer to that of the experience of art works in a gal
than it is to either the cinema in the movie theater or the visitor to a turn of the centu
ry panorama. We stand like the panorama viewer, but we also move around. We are not
the passive, immobile subject of Metz and Baudry's cinema, and neither are we Hug
Münsterberg's 1gth century train travelers. We are not "a mobile eye in an immobile
body."22 Our physical experience of Dean's images at the Tate Britain, is mor
the experience of a triptych. And so again, we are led back to a place of meeting
the static and moving image.
 Hand in hand with the films' invitation to explore the interstice - between differ
ent kinds of images, temporal rhythms, historical moments and spatial param
as viewers our experience is woven into their unpredictability and aleatory clements.
Dean embraces chance and coincidence within the frame, much like Snow's
Wavelength, when the sun sets, when a gull flies across the distant horizon
waiter's legs accidently obscure our view of the restaurant floor. This unpredictabili-
ty that we have already seen in the oblique associations between the triptych and
other images, and other forms of visual representation, then becomes echoed
viewing practice. Most notably, the three films may not be seen from beginnin
as the structure prescribed by the art museum as less fixed than that of the movie th
ater. And the order in which we see them, and therefore, the narrative we constru
around     them is always open to chance and circumstance. This is the le
in installation.
  The exhibition of Disappearance at Sea, Disappearance at Sea Il, and Fern
the form of a triptych - whether it be Dean's design or that of the Tate Britain
the works with qualities such as inestimable value, sacredness, and immob
any connection to its Renaissance counterparts, this triptych also seeks adoration
reverence from its viewer. It invokes uses of the image to spatially dem
to a history of narratives in which religion, art and history come together to
                                                                                       931
FRANCES GUERIN




contemporary world. These are qualities associated with the poly
reached its most exciting moment in the Renaissance altarpiece. This form is tak
again in the 2oth century by painters such as Max Beckmann and Francis Bacon. While
Beckmann and Bacon use the form for their Expressionist explorations of the internal
emotions and workings of the mind, Dean uses it to fuel her interest in the fractured
nature of our perception within the historical world. As I have demonstrated, the his.
torical world at stake in Disappearance at Sea, Disappearance al Sea Il, and
Fernsehturm is marked by an attachment to certain modern tcchnologies for their
utopian promise. They are revered for their infinite possibility, but as Dean's work
demonstrates, the promises are yet-to be realized, on a horizon line, out of scach of our
perceptual capacities. Characteristic of her tendency to invert and complicate the forms
and aesthetics which also give her inspiration, like those of Beckmann and Bacon,
Dean's films do not sit comfortably beside the Renaissance altarpiccc.



Conclusion


  There has been much interest in the re situation of the birth of cinema as other than
the 1895 Grand Café screening.23 This constant renegotiation of its beginnings is the
most common place for critics to renegotiate what the cinema is. Though we know bet
ter than to subject the ontological status of cinema to scrutiny, the impetus to keep
alive the debate about what constitutes the cinema is done through an historical lens
every time we propose another predecessor or relative of the cinema, whether it be from
the 18th century, the 19th century or even carlier. However, as long as the debate stays
focused at that end of the history of cinema, that is, its birth, we will ignore the more
pressing conversation about whether and how the cinema continues into the 21st cen
tury. We will continue to leave open the possibility that cinema be relegated to the his
torical past of the oth century, that it, like the lighthouse and the Fernsehturm, will
become obsolescent despite its one time celebrated radical aspirations.
  I want to propose that we need to look elsewhere, outside of the movie theater, and
find works that continue to challenge and extend the cinema into the 2st century.
Tacita Dean makes such works. Her films in installation renegotiate the cinema
through examining its cross pollination, its shared coastlines with other media: pho-
tography, painting, 19th century spectacles, religious iconography. When she places
her films in the art gallery, Dean takes them into times and spaces that reanimate cine-
ma, they give it new meanings, challenge its parameters, and place it, yet again, on the
edge. In these three films, the cinema is precariously balanced on the edge of ou
cal and visual understanding.



• This work could not have been carried out without the generosity of Dale McFarland at the
    Frith Strect Gallery who provided images and texts. My thanks also go to IV MAGIS - Gradisca
    International Film Studies Spring School for creating the forum for me to present this work,
    lo the School of Drama, Film and Visual Arts, for their support of the project. Lastly, I am also
    grateful to Alison Butler for her insights, comments and bibliographical information.
 a N. lamlyn, "Installation and Its Audience," in Film Art Phenomena (London: BFI, 2003). PP.
   43:44
                                                               INFINITE ROTATIONS IN A FINITE FRAME


3 Ibid.
4 Ibid
5 C. Wallis, "Introduction," in Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works (London: Tate
  Gallery Publishing, 2001), pp. 9-15. For a compelling account of Crowhurst's failed journey.
  and a portrait of him as driven, but always doomed, see N. Tomlin, R. Hall, The Strange Last
  Journcy of Donald Crowhurst (London: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 2003).
6 C. Wallis, op. cit., pp. 9-15.
> Cf. M. Newman, "Salvage," in Essays (Göttingen: Steidl, 2003). pages unnumbered.
8 Further clisions are created through the addition of the soundtrack. Not only is a space
   opened up between image and sound, but the constructed nature of the sound furth
   emphasizes the web of deceit of technology. In Disappearance at Sea Il, for example, the
   sound we assume to be that of the light in rotation is, in fact, produced by the ventilator shaft
   of a chip shop in Wolverhampton. Thanks to Alison Butler for this observation.
9 The connections that Dean explores between the past and the present, through abandone
  and forgotten objects, places and technologies runs through her oeuvre. See T. Dean, Selec
  Writings (Göttingen: Steidl, 2003). See also, J. Garimorth, "Tacita Dean: Time Frames", in
   Essays, op. cit.
10 On Dean's fascination with machines and technologies that are obsolescent - but still not
   dead - see her response to the October artist questionnaire on obsolescence a site of resist-
   ance. "Tacita Dean," October, no. 100 (Spring 2000), PP. 26-27.
11 Dean explains that in the German Democratic Republic dinner had to be completed in the
   time frame of sixty minutes, the length of time for a complete revolution. In 1989, a single
   revolution was doubled to last thirty minutes to keep up with "the progress of reunification."
   See T. Dean, "Fernschturm (backwards into the future)," in Tacita Dean. Berlin Works (St.
   Ives: Tate Gallery, 2005), p. 30.
12 We do not see them perform these tasks, but rather, assume it as the camera is level with their
   lower legs.
13 The euphoria around the cinema is particularly pronounced among the French and Soviet
   pre-World War II film theorists. See, for example, Dziga Vertov's writings collected in A.
   Michaelson (ed.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley Los Angeles-London:
   University of California Press, 1984); S. Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical
   Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960): J. Epstein, "For a New Avant-Garde," in R. Abel
   (ed.). French Film Theory and Criticism. Volume 1, 1907-1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
   University Press, 1988), pp. 349-352; R. Clair, "Rhythm," ibid., pp. 368-369: R. Taylor (ed.), S.M.
   Eisenstein: Selected Works (London: BFl, 1988-1996).
14 See, for example, F. Meschede, Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works (London: Tate
   Gallery, 2001).
I5 See, for example, M. Newman, op. cit., pages unnumbered.
16 John Grierson's experimental documentaries such as, Drifters (1929) come immediately to
   mind. For earlier examples, see also, Birt Acres Rough Sea at Dover (1895), and Rough Sea
   (1900), D.W. Griffiths' poetic vision of the sea in Lines of White on a Sullen Sea (1909).
17 Indeed, Dean brings the history of the "cinema's mobile and eminently variable eye" into the
   art gallery of the 2rst century. See Jacques Aumont's discussion of the variable eye, that is, an
   eye that has the potential to move, in J. Aumont, "The Variable Eye," in D. Andrew (ed.). The
   Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: University of Texas
   Press, 1997), pp. 23I-258.
18 F. Meschede, op. cit.

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