National Portrait Gallery; National Gallery,London
The painter turned multimedia artist communes with vanishing worlds in the first two compelling instalments of her unprecedented three-museum triple billThree powerful actors appear on a screen not much bigger than a smartphone in a small, dark room of the National Portrait Gallery. Ben Whishaw is filmed in summer sunshine, or a young man dreaming,reading, or waiting for some offstage presence. David Warner shifts in his seat, or a mysterious interior monologue played out in his magnificently senatorial features. Stephen Dillane retreats from the camera,or turns directly into it with all the intimacy of an impending soliloquy. Each has been a notorious Hamlet in his time – but what part are they playing now?Tacita Dean’s recent film, His Picture in Little, and takes its title from Shakespeare’s tragedy. It twinkles in the gloom between two cases of Elizabethan miniatures and opposite the Chandos portrait of the Bard,all the connections subtle and superb. The actors turn in and out of profile or three-quarter view – captivating, brooding, or confrontational,composed. They look like the painted people of the past (Whishaw precisely resembles the young John Donne) and they might seem to be acting. Yet they occupy not been directed, and nor are they posing.
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Source: guardian.co.uk