Douglas Gordon Doc: Subject Fights for Co-Authorship
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "Douglas Gordon By Douglas Gordon" premiered at Edinburgh Film Festival, a documentary portrait of the Scottish artist known for "24 Hour Psycho" (Hitchcock slowed to one frame per half second) and "Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait" (17 cameras tracking a single football player)
- Douglas Gordon rejected a passive subject role, actively fighting Pretsell for authorship of the film — a process Pretsell calls a "deconstruction of the documentary process" and which left him both "charmed and exasperated"
- Pretsell first met Gordon 20 years ago at Edinburgh Film Festival, where Gordon's warmth and Glaswegian manner inspired his filmmaking journey; he didn't consider a film about him until much later
- The project began during COVID when Pretsell's email went unanswered; Gordon then called from Berlin out of the blue asking "Film? Fiction? Drama? Series?" — and the two spent a year recording conversations before Pretsell was allowed into Gordon's studio
- Pretsell deliberately avoided explaining Gordon's famous artworks, telling viewers who want that: "This is the mind that created them. And him explaining it would make it no clearer to anyone."
- Pretsell admits he learned "nothing" about conceptual art from the process, but recognized Gordon's ability to turn "everything" into art — including the documentary itself, which Pretsell concedes "sort of" becomes another artwork in Gordon's oeuvre
Why it matters: By relinquishing control to his mercurial subject, Pretsell turns the documentary into another artwork in Gordon's oeuvre rather than an explainer. Viewers expecting decoded analysis of '24 Hour Psycho' or 'Zidane' instead get the conceptual mind behind them — and Gordon's own dictum that 'ambiguity is what it's all about.'
Ask SkimNews
