Here is a brave and not entirely orthodox artist documentary; not so much a dates-and-shows-and-talking-heads profile, but resembling something of an act of art in itself. The subject is Douglas Gordon, the Scottish film and video-maker, possibly best known for 24 Hour Psycho, his radically slowed-down presentation of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork, and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, the feature-length film about the legendary French footballer he co-directed with Philippe Pareno – which apart from anything else popularised the single-player camera that is now a fixture of mainstream TV coverage.
The film’s intention is essentially to put you inside Gordon’s day-to-day wrestling with the act of creativity, and therefore inside his mind; the vast majority of which is spent inside his Berlin warehouse studio, where Gordon cuts a basically solitary figure. Apart from the camera crew of course; Gordon spends a good deal of the film’s running time berating director Finlay Pretsell, in between setting things alight with a miniature blowtorch, smearing himself with silver paint, throwing shapes with a bullwhip and blowing bubbles from a family-size bubble tube.
Gordon appears to be acutely aware that the way he conducts himself – like a kid, as he openly admits – may appear self-indulgent and even ridiculous; and he’s not wrong; someone with this apparently radioactive level of self-involvement is hardly the most engaging of characters. But, as Gordon labours to explain, his art is all about taking a risk, generating interesting moments, and attempting to preserve them even decades down the line. The struggle to articulate this is what keeps Gordon – leathery, grizzled, inked all over, just about to turn 60 – committed to the film: he even suggests a title, Portrait of a Perilous Character, that would actually work pretty well.
Pretsell, you would think, has to have the patience of a saint to put up with this, but allows Gordon the time and space to get his point across. (The film’s actual title, with that “by Douglas Gordon”, suggests that the subject is pretty keen to assert his authorship of the final result.) Be that as it may, Pretsell drops in blip-sized clips of Gordon’s previous work, which is just about all the context we are allowed – other than a short bit of archive footage showing an amazingly fresh-faced Gordon collecting the Turner prize in 1996. The way that time makes fools of us all is a sub-theme here, especially when we see Gordon sobbing over his absent kids while encased in a pair of leopard-print leggings.
For all his flamboyance, Gordon remains a somewhat elusive figure; by the end we’re not much closer to identifying what really spurs him on. You get the sense he doesn’t really know either, and perhaps that’s the point.
• Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon screened at the Edinburgh film festival.
