01 Jul Douglas Gordon

In 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro (2008), Gordon plays Psycho on two large screens; one screen beginning at the start and the other running backwards from the end. The tension, rather than the storyline becomes the waiting for the point where the movies meet, a stitch linking the two before they move away “the mirrored images resembling a giant, slow-moving Rorschach test.”

The movies I was making have these sticking points too, tiny points of places where the movie run too and runs from simultaneously, but the movies shift a little each time, glitching in each recursion. In my experiments, I’ve taken small pieces of film and reversed them playing them backwards and slightly different speeds and with imagery slightly offset. I want the viewer to feel recognition as they watch, for small things to stick in the memory, but to be slightly disorientated, to question whether they recognise it from previous frames or if it is brought from their own memories, Either way, this trace forms part of their memory now.

In slowing down the film to this Gordon uses what he describes as an almost scientific method, As you watch you lose track of the narrative; by looking too close it stops making sense. This reminds me of Borges’s Funes – counting, recording obsessively to the point where the record-keeping becomes redundant, Gordon describes this as the viewer being “lost in a labyrinth of multiple, conflicting meanings, [where] you have to acknowledge your own forgetfulness.” (Gordon in Gagosian, 2018)

Gagosian (2018). Douglas Gordon, Gagosian Gallery, New York