Stroll into the cavernous Turbine Hall, the huge space in London's Tate Modern reserved for some of the most grand artistic statements of our times, and you'd be forgiven for mistaking it for a cinema. The film which lights up this darkened room might not win any Oscars for its creator, the artist Tacita Dean, but in its own way it's far more important than the latest blockbuster. The 11-minute short, projected on to a 13 metre-high monolith, is a homage to the dying art of making movies using 35mm analogue film, as digital becomes the medium of choice.
Dean's piece is called, simply, Film. It's an apt title, as this is probably the most literal of all the Tate artworks which have attracted more than 26 million people to see the likes of Olafur Eliasson's giant disc of yellow light or Ai Weiwei's porcelain sunflower seeds. In Film, the viewer not only sees the sprocket holes which are a visual shorthand for a reel, but the imperfections of the analogue filmmaking process itself.
Naturally, there is no digital post-production – because part of Dean's argument is that the limitations of the analogue form, of cutting and splicing film together, encourages a much greater sense of creativity, immediacy and urgency. And although she's been keen not to be cast as an anti-digital stick-in-the-mud, Dean is convinced that the ever-diminishing levels of film stock and the closure of labs that print film points towards only one outcome. Extinction.
"It's a call to arms, in a way," she told the BBC last month. "We're in danger of losing something really rather beautiful."
She's not alone in that view. Film industry blogs have been arguing that "film is dead" for a while now. Meanwhile, the major camera manufacturers Arri, Panavision and Aaton concentrate almost exclusively on the production of digital equipment these days. Still, Phil Radin, Panavision's executive vice president, worldwide marketing, isn't ready to sound the death knell quite yet – even though his company hasn't actually built a 35mm camera since late 2009.
"But that doesn't mean it's the last one we'll ever build," he says. "I can categorically tell you that Panavision has no long-term policy like that. Yes, the use of film cameras has diminished, but if people choose to shoot on film, then we can help them. Look at the music industry: people listened to vinyl for years and then digital came along in the form of CDs. Almost overnight vinyl disappeared. But now there is a huge resurgence of audiophiles who want to listen to music on vinyl. It's a similar situation here."
In fact, although the use of 35mm has evaporated to the point where it's not really necessary to build new cameras, the big moviemakers still like the look analogue film can provide. Even blockbusters such as Inception, festooned with special effects much easier to manipulate using digital, were shot with Panavision's Millennium XL film camera. So despite all the evidence seeming to suggest that digital is cheaper, easier and more widely used, there are still die-hard cinematographers keeping the flame alive for analogue. Why do they bother?
"Well, some say it's more organic in feel," explains Radin. "Some say it represents contrast better. Others believe the colour palette is more true to the eye than digital. But then you'd probably get other cinematographers arguing the exact opposite!
"Essentially, it's like an artist deciding whether to paint something in oil or watercolour. Each movie director has a very specific look they're trying to achieve. And to continue the analogy, when an artist looks at the scene in front of him, he will make the decision about what is the best paint to use. One is not better than the other, they're just two different ways."
Still, when Gareth Edwards can produce Monsters – one of the best sci-fi films of recent times – for just $500,000 (Dh1.8m), using a digital camera and a desktop computer, it's not difficult to surmise that digital will be the dominant form. In fact, the Oscar-nominated auteur Mike Leigh last year said he was positive that the availability and relative cheapness of digital equipment was encouraging a whole new generation of young filmmakers. It's a situation the Emirati director Rashid Al Marri can understand – if only because 35mm film itself is so rare in the UAE.
"And it's much more expensive," he adds. "It is possible to film in 35mm of course, but there's just not the infrastructure: you not only need the cameras and the film, you also need labs to process it, you have to think about editing it and then you need to print your final product to screen it. There have never been any film-printing facilities in the UAE and there never will be. You'd have to send it off to India or the UK."
All of which would make the notion of shooting Letters To Palestine – his latest film, which won the Special Jury Prize for Short Documentary at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival last month – in 35mm completely ridiculous. In fact, Al Marri believes that the advent of digital cameras means 95 per cent of would-be Emirati directors who were put off by the trials and tribulations of working with analogue are now getting the chance to make films.
"And I include myself in that figure," he says. "Even so, if you'd asked me five years ago, I would still have preferred to work with film, because digital was never as good technically. We were using video cameras designed for television and there were huge limitations - you could clearly see that digital was awful compared with even the cheapest film.
"But the Digital Cinema cameras of today are as good as film, better in some respects. So if given a choice, I really see no reason to use film anymore except for the sake of nostalgia. I would use digital all the way."
Al Marri's view would not, one imagines, be popular inside Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. But if digital democratises filmmaking, then perhaps - as sad as it might seem - Tacita Dean is just a victim of progress.
