Feature Film (Film de fiction), 1998
1 video projector, 4 to 6 loudspeakers,
1 video, PAL, 16:9, colour, stereo sound, 123’
Co-produced by the New Media Department,
Centre Pompidou and Artangel, London
Feature Film is, indeed, Douglas Gordon’s first feature film, at least in terms of artistic direction and length, if not in terms of what we normally associate with the notion of “feature film.” There is no dialogue, no sequential narrative. Best known for appropriating others’ films and manipulating them for his own conceptual purposes (most notably 24 Hour Psycho, 1993, and Through A Looking Glass, 1999), in Feature Film, commissioned by the Centre Pompidou, Gordon both appropriates the musical score of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film, Vertigo, and directs his own lyrical version of Bernard Hermann’s music for Vertigo newly conducted by James Conlon, conductor of the Paris National Opera. Feature Film has two versions, one a single screen, 35mm projection running seventy four minutes (the length of the original score) that can be seen in a movie house, the other, an installation containing a suspended screen with a two-sided projection of the 128 minute version of Gordon’s film (the same length as Vertigo) plus a copy of Hitchcock’s Vertigo playing on a small television set in a corner of the gallery space. Just as he denuded Psycho of its terror by stretching it out to twenty four hours, in Feature Film, Gordon, severs the music of Vertigo from its source and makes an alternative film of an emotionally involved conductor (Conlon) as he directs the score to an orchestra we never see. Shot entirely in close-ups of Conlon’s arms, fingers, mouth, eyes, and forehead, the film functions on many levels. In it, Gordon engages in his familiar strategies of disrupting the viewing experience of traditional cinema and demanding of viewers that they see the artifice of cinema for what it is. In the installation version he is also creating a type of vertigo (an experience of disorientation and dizziness) as viewers try to simultaneously balance the visual dual between Gordon’s film of the music performance and Hitchcock’s engaging, fast-paced mystery featuring the movie icons James Stewart and Kim Novak. Viewers are not sure where to focus. They are inevitably drawn to the familiar film noir on the small television, yet Gordon’s large, full color projection demands that they look at the handsome conductor as he engages with the music. But where is the orchestra and why do the conductor’s hand movements seem at times out of synch with the music we’re hearing? Gordon has always been interested in establishing conflicts, in creating disjunctions. Describing Feature Film, he says, “it involves a slight but serious rupture in cognition by taking one thing from its natural home to another place, another time….(I am) taking this score and divorcing it from one film (Vertigo) and arranging an affair with another (Feature Film).” For Gordon, this is “an interesting game to play.” Problematic mental states such as psychological splitting and anxiety (including hysteria) often become materials for his art. In Vertigo he has found a cornucopia of psychological disabilities including paranoia, guilt, deception, suicide, cross-dressing fetishism, to name a few. These themes may have sparked his interest, but in Feature Film something very personal is happening. In his first directed (as opposed to appropriated) film, Gordon finds in James Conlon a doppelganger of sorts. We see the conductor dressed, atypically for his profession, but typical for an artist, in a black cotton, turtle-neck shirt, sleeves rolled up, revealing arms that, while less hirsute, are similar to Gordon’s own, as he has displayed them in numerous photographic works over the years from Tattoo I and Tattoo II, both 1994; A Divided Self, 1996; Blue, 1998; to Fragile Hands Collapse Under Pressure, 1998. Feature Film is essentially a ballet for hands, choreographed by a musical conductor, James Conlon, who, not coincidentally, is roughly the same age as Gordon, has Gordon’s Irish/Scottish complexion and is himself an interpreter of other artists’ works, in his case, composers. Feature Film is at once a performance, a documentary and an autobiography. Gordon’s intimate focus on Conlon’s arms and eyes, in particular, are an homage to the artist/director whose vision and hands-on involvement with the tools of his art, whether they be a camera, a musical score, paint, or marble define the very production of art. Surely, Gordon could have accomplished his customary ends of disruption and cognitive dissonance by extracting the musical score of the film and playing it on a separate tape slightly out of synch with the original film had he simply wanted to move the music from the background of the viewing/listening experience to the foreground. In Feature Film he was after much more than that. In his directorial debut he was making a film about directing film, up-close and personal. Michael Rush
