Titled 'Green Rays on Historical Horizons: The Filmic Refractions of Tacita Dean’s The Green Ray and Éric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert,' Utterson's article comparatively analyzes two filmic quests to capture the rarely occurring fleeting flash of green as the setting sun refracts from beyond the horizon in certain atmospheric conditions.
It focuses on British artist-filmmaker Tacita Dean's installation piece The Green Ray (2001) and French filmmaker Éric Rohmer's narrative feature Le Rayon vert (1986, aka The Green Ray in English translation).
Looking back, the article argues, in spanning histories and horizons alike, these very different works collectively offer a revealing route to understanding the changing materialities and technologies of film and our faith or otherwise in the ontology of the moving image over time.
Among other publications, Utterson is the author of the books From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Persistent Images: Encountering Film History in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
This most recent article continues his broader scholarship in mapping the history of the moving image with a particular focus on the technologies and aesthetics of cinema.
Andrew Utterson publishes article in Quarterly Review of Film and Video
By Andrew Utterson, September 6, 2021