{"id":587447,"date":"2026-08-17T13:42:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T13:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/587447\/"},"modified":"2026-08-17T13:42:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T13:42:09","slug":"douglas-gordon-by-douglas-gordon-review-a-brave-glimpse-inside-the-mind-of-the-scottish-artist-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/587447\/","title":{"rendered":"Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon review \u2013 a brave glimpse inside the mind of the Scottish artist | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s masterwork, and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait<\/a>, the feature-length film about the legendary French footballer he co-directed with Philippe Pareno \u2013 which apart from anything else popularised the single-player camera that is now a fixture of mainstream TV coverage.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s intention is essentially to put you inside Gordon\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Gordon appears to be acutely aware that the way he conducts himself \u2013 like a kid, as he openly admits \u2013 may appear self-indulgent and even ridiculous; and he\u2019s 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 \u2013 leathery, grizzled, inked all over, just about to turn 60 \u2013 committed to the film: he even suggests a title, Portrait of a Perilous Character, that would actually work pretty well.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s actual title, with that \u201cby Douglas Gordon\u201d, 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\u2019s previous work, which is just about all the context we are allowed \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

For all his flamboyance, Gordon remains a somewhat elusive figure; by the end we\u2019re not much closer to identifying what really spurs him on. You get the sense he doesn\u2019t really know either, and perhaps that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n

Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon screened at the Edinburgh film festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here is a brave and not entirely orthodox artist documentary; not so much a dates-and-shows-and-talking-heads profile, but resembling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-587447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}