The new occupant of Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall was revealed the other day when the latest in the gallery’s series of spectacular Unilever commissions took up residence at Bankside. Tacita Dean is the artist in question: she has plunged the enormous space into darkness, up-ended a gigantic cinema screen at one end of the chasm and is projecting her 11-minute film – the less-than-mysteriously-named ‘Film’ – in glorious Tate-O-Rama until March next year.

My first thought on seeing the press coverage was that it was something like a cinematic version of Brian Eno’s ‘video paintings’ of the mid-eighties, which necessitated turning a television (of the cathode ray variety, naturally) on its side, in an attempt to circumvent received notions of what television could and should be. By working outside the unchanging format of broadcast TV, Eno aimed to create a contemplative, ambient video art unbound by the conventions of storytelling and documentary.

However, the reports surrounding Dean’s monumental new work suggest that the initially-jarring vertical cinema format is perhaps one of the least important aspects of her new piece. Much more important seems to be her propagandist intent – an urge to speak out in favour of physical film as a medium in a digital age.

I haven’t yet seen the work, which fixates on the medium by exposing the sprocket holes and giving an airing to a catalogue of in-camera optical effects of a type that can probably be recreated in a fraction of a second using digital post-production methods, but which are thus rendered less impressive by that very fact – that they can be applied unthinkingly, and without risk. However, I can’t help but be engaged by the issue she cares about so deeply – “This beautiful medium, which we invented 125 years ago, is about to go,” she was reported as saying in The Guardian – and while I don’t think for a moment that the forward march of digital ‘film’ production can be halted, this work will give many people cause to pause and think about the demise of physical film in particular and analogue media in general.

Because while we demolish our popcorn, the very stuff the twentieth century was made of – or at least recorded on – is spooling through its final reel.

‘Film’ by Tacita Dean is at Tate Modern until March 11th 2012.

You can see The Guardian’s ‘Film’ picture gallery here.

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