The chance of seeing the green ray

Tacita Dean
The Green Ray [Still], 2001
16mm colour, mute
2 minutes, 30 seconds

«When the sun sets into a clear crisp horizon, and when there is no land in front of you for a few hundred miles, and no distant moisture that could become, at the final moment, a back lit cloud that obscures the opportunity, you stand a very good chance of seeing the green ray.

The last ray of the dying sun to refract and bend beneath the horizon is the green ray, which is just slower than the red or the yellow ray. Sailors see them more than the rest of us, and they have come to signify for some the harbinger of great change or fortune in their lives. For years I have sought out the green ray, peering at horizons for that last fractional second of greenness, not knowing or daring to imagine how extravagant a green splash it might be, but never have I seen it.

And then in the summer of last year, as I set off to a small, near inaccessible village on the west coast of Madagascar to see the total eclipse of the sun, I was as much lured there by a fleeting remark on an eclipse watcher’s website saying that those of us who made it as far as Morombe might also stand a chance of seeing the green ray. I learnt the night before I left, that Eric Rohmer had faked his, and that his cameraman had waited for two months in the Canary Islands for every setting sun before giving up and going home. His post-produced extravaganza was no gauge by which to measure the green ray. I had a quest to try to see, if not film, something that I could not imagine.

The point about my film of the green ray is that it did so nearly elude me too. As I took vigil, evening after evening, on that Morombe beach looking out across the Mozambique Channel, timing the total disappearance of the sun in a single roll of film, I believed, but was never sure that I saw it.

The evening I filmed the green ray, I was not alone. On the beach beside me were two others with a video camera pointed at the sun, infected by my enthusiasm for this elusive phenomenon. They didn’t see it that night, and their video documentation was watched as evidence to prove that I hadn’t seen it either. But when my film fragment was later processed in England, there, unmistakably, defying solid representation on a single frame of celluloid, but existent in the fleeting movement of film frames, was the green ray, having proved itself too elusive for the pixellation of the digital world. So looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see. This film is a document; it has become about the very fabric, material and manufacture of film itself.»

Texto de Tacita Dean