Thursday, February 19, 2026 at 8:00 PM to 10:30 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Lightstruck presents *Tacita Dean & Robert Nelson: Acting on Film* with Tacita Dean in person! Lightstruck is honored to welcome artist Tacita Dean for a rare cinematic projection of her riveting 2015 film *Event for a Stage*, paired with Robert Nelson’s seldom seen 1982 short film *Hamlet Act*, both screening in their original 16mm format. These two remarkable films each explore the endlessly complex interplay between live performance and cinematic construction, as the camera, editing, and even the director’s presence complicate the illusion of narrative continuity, not to mention the presumptive reality that appears to hover at the margins. Nelson’s film is a brilliant and unusual deconstruction of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, activated into multiple, recursive layers of artifice through its employment of film and video to extend the original text’s nested complexity. Outtakes, retakes, and the typically unseen ragged edges of live performance carry as much meaning here as Shakespeare’s precise words and stage directions, giving us an exploded view of the highly constructed nature of cinematic performance. Also invoking Shakespeare is actor Stephen Dillane in Dean’s breathtaking film, in which the volleying interactions between actor and director frame an almost molecular exploration of live performance and its resistance and acquiescence to being captured. Dean filmed the absolutely magnetic Dillane over four disparate performances, recomposing them into an explicitly filmic thread of continuity as he navigates between themes of memory, forgetting, family, artifice, and above all, the slippery power balance between actor and filmmaker at the heart of every cinematic performance. Program and notes by Mark Toscano. Very special thanks to Tacita Dean, with additional thanks to Marine Pariente and Marian Goodman Gallery. 16mm print of Event for a Stage courtesy of Tacita Dean and Marian Goodman Gallery. 16mm print of Hamlet Act courtesy of the estate of Robert Nelson and Canyon Cinema.