Gordon, Gillian Wearing, Fiona Tan, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, David Claerbout,
Steve McQueen, Sharon Lockhart, Stan Douglas, Mark Lewis, and
Victor Burgin, among others. Art’s preference for the slow is motivated
by more than the desire to separate itself from mainstream cinema and
spectacle at large. Slowness enables film to approach the traditional
sense of ‘presence’ typical of art’s materially fixed media such as paint-
ing, sculpture and photography, all of which have valued the depiction
rather than re-creation of movement. The fact that things happen
only incrementally in films often screened as loops means that one
has the opportunity to contemplate and interrogatewhile looking,
an experience that continues to remain central to the depictive arts,
regardless of media.
In 1993 Douglas Gordon transferred Hitchcock’sPsycho( 1960 ) to
video, silenced it and slowed it down twelve-fold so that it lasted a whole
day. Running at two frames per second, 24 Hour
Psychoinvites a microscopic dissection of the original,
holding each scene long enough to yield more mean-
ing than was ever required by the narrative. Three
years later Gillian Wearing assembled police officers
as if for a photograph but had them attempt to
hold still for an hour in front of her video camera.^23
A snapshot is replaced by 60 minutes of stiff posing,
except for the inevitable sniffing, coughing, shuffling
and yelps of relief when the hour is up. But the
extreme had already come in 1978 when James
Coleman had made half a second of James Whale’s
film version ofThe Invisible Man( 1933 ) last more than
eight hours.^24 Transferring twelve frames to mounted
slides for projection, he produced a sequence of twenty-
minute long dissolves from one to the next, in which
the invisible man is shot and becomes visible as he
dies. To the eye the transformation is neither visible
nor invisible, but hovers somewhere in between.
Pursuing what he terms ‘part cinema’, the artist
Mark Lewis makes single-take short films that extend 39
26 Douglas Gordon, installation shot of 24
Hour Psycho, 1993.Video installation, 24
hours.