What the Tate Movie Project is all about Link to this video
On the face of it, there’s not any item reason wherefore the Tate gallery shouldn’t be getting involved in film-making: about all, its confess commissions to fill the Turbine Hall have been a consistent success, and fine-art spaces the world over are finding themselves invaded by moving images as much as paintings, sculpture and installations. Not to cursory reference artists themselves – Julian Schnabel, Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen, et al – who are stepping forward to deliver movies on equal terms with “proper” film directors.
What is strange, though, is who Tate is getting into bed with. When it shows films, they tend to be firmly on the recondite end of the spectrum – probable the art-porn Destricted assemblage or the Italian exploitation movies much loved of Tarantino fans. So no one would have been surprised whether or not the Tate wanted to make some Larry Clark junkie saga, or a series of shorts in all parts of the pre-Raphaelites by Sam Taylor-Wood and Mark Wallinger. The fact that the Tate is joining up with the most family-friendly, whitest-bread film outfit in the country, Aardman Animations, is frankly, a bit of a shocker.
Details are a tad sketchy at the element, but-end the Tate Movie Project appears to be one of those impeccably 21st century creations, designed to keep arts-funding bureaucrats, if no some else, forward the edge of their seats. It’s connected at one end to the 2012 Olympics – for whose do a good turn the Legacy Trust is funding the device – and at the other to “every infant in Britain” who, if Tate director Nicholas Serota is to believed, will exist contributing directly to the film.
Quite how this will work is anyone’s guess – the last participatory movie I can think of, MySpace’s Faintheart – didn’t exactly generate faith in the communal approach. Will the workshops be much greater degree of than long-lead marketing devices? Will the final pellicle simply be a sludge of kiddie cliches? Aardman, who will no doubt have a crack team on the case, will be wary of film-making by committee, however well-intentioned it is.
But whatever the outcome, Aardman is the beneficiary of a chunk of money from the public purse. Can it really raise a feature-length animated film concerning £4m? Sounds like credit-crunch economics are really kicking in.
But lest we get too sceptical, it’s credit remembering that bureaucratic initiatives can sometimes come up with cinema gold – Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City came out of a scheme to make films for Liverpool’s European capital of culture year. Will the Tate Movie Project match up? First they have to change the ground of claim…
