The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean

It's 'FILM', bellows the all-caps title of the latest Turbine Hall installation, ticking off the one obvious medium that hadn't yet graced this annual sound, light and sculpture commission. (Could you even contemplate a painting being made for this space?) There's no need for the shouting, because Tacita Dean's soothing and, yes, painterly, 11-minute movie has no sound or jaw-dropping animation. It's captivating in different ways, but its refusal to pander to our insatiable need for mega-experiential works of art fuckoffery is perhaps its greatest quality.

Tipping a widescreen, 35mm projection on its end results in a towering vertical column of flickering illumination in an otherwise darkened hall. It also mimics the shape of the old power station's void closely enough for Dean to steadfastly train her Cinemascope camera on the far wall throughout. She then parades treat after visual treat in front of this almost 1:1 scaled backdrop, poking fun at the Tate as cathedral of culture with coloured lenses that recall stained-glass windows, or with misty mountain-tops or clips of setting suns that recall previous supersized space-fillers by Olafur Eliasson (the sun) and Rachel Whiteread (the white boxes).

All this gentle parody aside, 'FILM' is a heartfelt billet doux to Dean's chosen medium and specifically to the steady demise of 16mm film stock and the closure of the facilities needed to print and develop it, including her beloved Soho Labs, which shut in February. The symbolic punch-holes of celluloid on either side of the Turbine screen help to frame and underscore her cinematic project, although they do get in the way of what's in between. Here Dean has gone to incredible lengths to create magical moments with only the most basic editing and in-camera techniques.

If you were a fan of 'Be Kind Rewind', then you could think of this as Dean's 'sweding' of the art-house aesthetics of experimental, structuralist filmmakers such as Len Lye, Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow, with a few of the early special effects used in movies such as '2001: A Space Odyssey' or 'Star Wars' - including overprinting, masking and matte glass painting - thrown in for good measure.

Dean's 'FILM' is an ode to analogue - to the scratchiness and physicality of real film - but it's also a portrait of simpler times, when we didn't rely on alternate realities and digital information to shape our lives. The sad truth is that such modes of entertainment can't compete with the exponential possibilities of technology, but they might engender art that is more careful, thoughtful and less noisy. Wherever you stand on the digital/Luddite divide, though, it's hard not to get swept away by Dean's drifting, seemingly monumental soap bubbles and the occasional vertical rush of a waterfall. I will remember this installation as an atmosphere or an image rather than as experience or event.