Douglas Gordon (2005)
“Douglas Gordon,” Contemporary [London], 71 (2005), pp. 54-57.
For my book Double-Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon, click here.
Douglas Gordon
Douglas Gordon takes on the grand themes in his video installations. Basing his work on film noir and the continuation of its legacy with Hollywood masters such as Hitchcock and Scorsese, he deals out the fatal themes of guilt and betrayal of trust. While he takes his images straight from his sources, he further entraps the original protagonists in the prison house he imposes by modifications he subtly performs that touch on nothing but the temporal structure of the images—extending the film in slow motion (famously as in 24 Hour Psycho, the work that made his reputation in 1993) or cutting into a narrative and playing it back against itself (such as in through a looking glass, based on Taxi Driver, where De Niro’s “you talking to me?” monologue mimics itself across the installation).
Doubling the film back on itself creates a closed universe, a virtual reality, where actions mirror themselves and actors are helpless against the duplicity of their doppelgängers. Setting the whole length of Otto Preminger’s 1949 Whirlpool so that two projections of the film mirror each other at a seam, but projecting only odd or even frames for each, in left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right (1999), Gordon intensifies the theme of the madness of the double but also absorbs us in the protagonist’s mental dilemma: our vision too is disturbed by the effects of the projections.
By varying the construction of his projections from work to work but repeating his themes, Gordon seems to uphold a rigid moral code, a Manichean opposition of good and evil. This is perhaps the appeal to him of the story of Jekyll and Hyde, which, moreover, originates from his Calvinist homeland. Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1995–96)—the title deriving from another Scottish writer, James Hogg, influential on Gordon’s doppelgänger themes—excerpts the transformation of Jekyll to Hyde and back from Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 film but keeps repeating Jeykll’s plight in an infinite loop. No escape is offered, even though the story’s author, R. L. Stevenson, relents. As spectators, we can walk away but not the protagonist. Or, at least, so we think.
Gordon reduces that detachment for us in later work. In a sense, through a looking glass (1999) repeats Confessions of a Justified Sinner: in a dissociation of self, one character becomes two before our eyes. Yet we are implicated differently, more complexly, in the later work. In Confessions, we witness Jekyll’s transformation but at a distance; we are not yet in the space and time of the installation that would render the character’s psychological disorder palpable. By opposing two identical sequences of Taxi Driver in progressive delay to one another and looping them, Gordon turns De Niro’s clichéd seventy-one second monologue into a permutational dialogue that takes about an hour to unfold. As such, the installation displays the unravelling of the psychotic Bickle, but this is only a pretense, merely a trick of the apparatus that gets our attention, that captures us in the work’s temporal slippage. For all that has happened here, in the repetition of like images derived from the closed system of another film, is the difference that time makes. Everything changes through Gordon’s calculation of a temporal difference: we are now interior to the time of the image, no longer witnesses spatially external to it.
Time has always been the subject of Gordon’s projections, from 24 Hour Psycho on, which makes Gordon in part a displaced experimental filmmaker. Yet Gordon only accomplishes his temporal constructions by his interventions into narrative Hollywood movies. He repeats an original but achieves his temporal effects through divergences of repetition. Repetition is as much a subject as temporality in these works—so is dissimulation that devises its structural effects from the unequal distribution of a disguised repetition which surfaces in the doublings of Gordon’s mirrored constructions: the reflected images are not equal. Dissemblance brings about a new structure that includes the original film but exceeds it.
The opposition of good and evil is only one dissimulation within the overall strategies of this work where all is dissemblance. Thus, Gordon’s reliance on film noir themes should not necessarily be taken at face value. He doesn’t only entrap his victims in his film constructions as appropriate punishment for the fatal choices they made: the case of Marion Crane stealing $40,000 and then taking the wrong turn to the Bates Motel. More like an accomplice to a crime, Gordon offers a hideout: the chiasmatic reversals, inversions, or doublings that structure his work are abyssal voids from which new heroines arise, as the simulacra they are. Such is the case in Gordon’s reworking of Hitchcock’s Vertigo in Feature Film (1999), where Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton, who dies in the original, doesn’t even appear in the “remake,”a film devoted to the recording of Bernard Herrmann’s score to Hitchcock’s masterpiece. Yet, as femme fatale simulacrum, she issues from the distance between the separation of sound and image (a separation which inaugurates all Gordon’s video projections), the silent Vertigo and the orchestral Feature Film, the position from which Gordon manipulates us in mimicry of Hitchcock’s control of his characters. In a simulacrum of herself that she alone masters, the femme fatale commands in her absence to usurp mastery and undo the male rivalries of Hitchcock’s film.