DOUGLAS GORDON - FEATURE FILM

Douglas Gordon’s (1966) ongoing fascination with Alfred Hitchcock has led to some extraordinary works - from strange letters posted to characters from Rear Window to the well-known 24 Hour Psycho. Gordon’s Feature Film focuses on another Hitchcock classic: Vertigo. Using Bernard Herrmann’s momentous film score, Gordon made a film concentrating solely on the music of the original and featuring James Conlon, chef d’orchestre of the Paris Opera. The result is a captivating film in which the music is played out by the dramatic gestures of the conductor’s head and hands. The viewer is led astray in an attempt to (re)discover the now-virtual images of Vertigo beneath the actual ones. “The shift of the music to the foreground never makes us long for the film of which it is the trace, because it becomes the soul of that film. And that soul has a body. It is the body of an absent image which resurfaces, an immense, remanent image. And this body becomes a body of fiction, because the extreme documentary stance which re-animates it has been able to take full inspiration from the music’s implication in the sovereign fiction of which it is the resonance.” (Raymond Bellour)

1999, 75’, 35mm, colour, sound

SUPPORTED BY GALERIE JAN MOT

The Ecran d’Art series is a monthly screening of artists’ film and/or video jointly organised by argos and Cinema Arenberg, in collaboration with La Cambre Academy.