Prolific artist-filmmaker Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event is indeed an “event.” Part of the Images Festival, the 16mm film is one of the last glimpses we have of late avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham, and is being projected in timed screenings at Gallery TPW, rather than run in a loop. (It’s co-presented by TIFF Cinematheque’s Free Screen series.) This is not a pedantic film-geek thing: the work would be spoiled if it were played in a loop and walked into by happenstance, for it is about the unspooling of an artist’s deliberation over chunks of time, both large and small.

Taking place in a light-filled craneway (a floating warehouse), overlooking the San Francisco Bay in the suburb of Richmond, Craneway Event follows a wheelchair-bound Cunningham as he directs a group of dancers over three days. These days are clearly demarcated in the film as chapters by the sun, shining in its unmistakably West Coast manner, and slowly casting shadows and pinkish-red hues as it heralds the close of each practice. Dean’s gaze is noteworthy for its stasis, an obvious paradox given that this is ostensibly a film about dance.

She chooses anamorphic widescreen as her aspect ratio (a format with which other dancer-director pros like Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly have struggled), mimicking the shape of the craneway, yet also cutting off a fair degree of the action. The takes are long, and the camera does not pan or follow, remaining a stately window through which to view movement. Sailboats passing on the bay in the background seem remarkably fast in contrast to the business within the concentrated practice-space that is her subject.

Complementing this static apparatus is, of course, Cunningham himself, 90 years old and directing mostly through his voice. He falls asleep on the third day, during a pretty complete run-through, but this seems more due to contentedness than anything else. Dean’s film explores many things — the eccentric, organic mechanics of any kind of corps; concentration; northern California — but, above all, seems concerned with the poignant moment at which a successful artist’s creative mind makes its firm transfer to the material world around him. Dancers enact a language all their own, of course, and good choreographers know how to set this in motion; Cunningham has done not only this, but has also, as Dean proves, so contributed to this language that his body and voice are, miraculously here, rendered almost redundant.

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