Waiting for the Green Ray

Tacita Dean

The Green Ray [Still], 2001 16mm colour, mute

• 2 minutes, 30 seconds
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• Tacita Dean’s short film The Green Ray was shot on the west-coast of Madagascar. It depicts the last ray of the dying sun refracting and bending below the horizon and producing, for a fraction of a second, a distinctive greenish glow. For Dean searching for this elusive event became about the act of looking itself, about faith and the belief in what you see.
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• PR taken from Firth street Gallery

Dean suggests; In America they call it the green flash. When the sun sets, in a very clear horizon, with no land mass for many hundreds of miles, and no moisture or atmospheric pressure, you have a good chance of seeing it. The slowest ray is the blue ray, which comes across as green when the sun sets in perfect atmospheric conditions. It’s the last ray as the sun recedes with the curvature of the earth. Like a pulse on the horizon. It’s totally fractional, though it can last longer.