24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth To and Fro

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2010

24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth To and Fro
Douglas Gordon
2008 Silent
24 hours Video Installation with two screens and two projections

This dual channel video installation, which consists of two side-by-side projections of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), represents a high watermark for Douglas Gordon’s screen-based practice. Both projections are slowed down (to a duration of twenty-four hours—one playing forwards and the other in reverse—so that they meet at one point, with an identical image that lasts for one second. This is an adaptation of the artist’s much-celebrated 24 Hour Psycho. Like his extraordinary feature film debut, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth To and Fro speaks profoundly to ideas of time, stillness and expectation. A command of those subliminal sates of being also drove Hitchcok’s finest work, even if the wily old master laced them with feelings of dread and entrapment to keep his audience hooked. Gordon’s work also elicits anxiety, but the source is less tangible and more intrinsic, as though sewn within us by the Golden Age of Cinema.
—Noah Cowan