Feature Film: press coverage

The Guardian, 3 April 1999

The Guardian, 3 April 1999:
“It is a long walk up to the top floor of the old Truman Brewery on London's Brick Lane, where you can see Turner Prize-winner Douglas Gordon's latest work, Feature Film. This is based on Hitchcock's Vertigo, and the climb may make you think of James Stewart's scary ascent, following Kim Novak to the belfry from which she fell. She did fall, didn't she? The double-sided screen, hanging at a midpoint in a vast darkened space, feels a long way away. The screen is dark. The echoing space is silent. Suddenly the space is filled with sound - a fragmented orchestral score as brooding, anxious, precipitous and dark as the space it inhabits. But what is up on the screen? Not Jimmy Stewart with his vertigo of confusions and desires, not Kim Novak in her double, duplicitous role in this most desolate of Hitchcock's films, but a close-up of James Conlon, chef d'orchestre of the Paris Opera and the Cologne Philharmonic, conducting an invisible 100-piece orchestra […]

“Feature Film, an Artangel commission, is simply the most complex and accomplished work that Gordon has made to date. His seamless, dramatic edit of the camerawork (Conlon was scrutinised by several cameras at once), ending with a close-up of the conductor's fierce and glistening eye, is to my mind, heart-stopping. This is a blind man's movie, a dancer's movie, a Hitchcockian installational McGuffin, a piece of art to dissect and be swept away by. This year is Hitchcock's centenary, and it is also Gordon's coming of age.” (Adrian Searle – read full article)

The Times, 7 April 1999:
“Gordon succeeds in presenting an audacious alternative to the experience normally offered by Vertigo. In a conventional cinematic presentation, Herrmann’s contribution is always subservient to the overall impact of Hitchcock’s directorial vision. Audiences may even remain unaware of its exceptional potency, and give Hitchcock unqualified credit for Vertigo’s ability to sear the imagination. By slicing off Herrmann’s work and holding it up for inspection, Gordon enables us to assess it with far greater clarity. And by showing how ardently Conlon responds to the score, the full extent of its capacity to ensnare us in Vertigo’s nightmarish convolutions is revealed.

“Anyone familiar with Gordon’s previous work will appreciate how his fascination with Conlon’s movements relates to earlier concerns. Conlon’s exclamatory manual gestures reminded me in particular of a short, disturbing work that Gordon based on a film showing a hand endlessly repeating the act of firing a gun. He called it Trigger-Finger, and the neurosis it exposed is far removed from Conlon’s infinitely supple responses. All the same, Gordon uses hands in both these contrasted works to disclose a surprising amount about the emotional condition of the men themselves.” (Richard Cork)

Tate, Summer 1999:
“Gordon has created a film from flashing arm movements, hands curled like wound springs, sweat dripping down Conlon’s forehead, his furrowed brow and black eyes, dark with concentration. With each bar of the music, as tension builds and the strings mount their attack on our senses with their off-key arpeggios, the film abstracts the conductor into a series of movements that seem to enhance the power of the music. At several junctures the 1960s-style space-age harps and shrill violins become increasingly piercing when the frenetic hand movements suddenly disappear from screen – instead of signalling the end of a scary scene, the music continues to build, and you become more nervous waiting for the crash of the hands back into the realm of the camera. The music alone makes your stomach turn […]

“Gordon’s film is mesmerising, which is surprising considering its very simple subject and the long pauses in the soundtrack where the main screen goes dark and the Technicolor stars mime their conversations on the side wall. But Conlon becomes the music in many ways, and his taut body and face puckered up in concentration seem to conjure up the underlying themes of Vertigo: its bleakness, its trauma and its almost constant repetition of filmic vertiginous moments and soaring dischords by the orchestra.” (Charlotte Mullins)

The Daily Telegraph, 7 April 1999:
“Strange how potent cheap music is. From the moment the opening credits begin to roll, Hermann’s urgent, whining, neurotically intense score starts to eat away at us. As an unblinking eye fills the screen, the high-pitched strings and wind instruments set up a wail of pain and sorrow, while the sonorous bass line chillingly announces the themes of possession, obsession and loss. The use of music in Vertigo to suggest the workings of the unconscious is particularly important, because for surprisingly long stretches of the film no one says anything […]

“Feature Film is about the strangeness, beauty and glamour that the cinema used to have. It could almost be seen as a riposte to Hollywood’s recent frame-by-frame remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, a project so redolent of cultural exhaustion that it might easily have been dreamed up by a postmodern artist such as Gordon himself.

“Gordon wants to jolt us into looking at a medium whose technological tricks have become so familiar that we no longer see how magical it really is. Spend an hour or so in Feature Film and I promise that you’ll never take the movies for granted again.” (Richard Dorment)

What’s on in London, 21 April 1999:
“It’s dramatic stuff, and the cavernous, gloomy innards of the Atlantis Gallery make a wonderfully apt setting. You can practically cut the atmosphere with a knife as you step inside. Gordon has managed to successfully recreate – almost distil – the suspense of a thriller. He has extracted the narrative and left the viewer with the deconstructed bare bones of images, music and emotions. You could loiter in the shadows all day as Conlon wildly waves his hands and you wait for Novak to make her final descent from the belfry tower. Giddily gripping stuff.” (Cheryl Freedman)

Frieze 97, September – October 1999:
“If Feature Film is a study in concentration, it’s difficult - despite the singularity of its central image - to pinpoint exactly what it’s concentrating on. Which perhaps is because, like the most interesting painters, Gordon has distilled a lot of ideas into a single image - the conductor, who becomes, as the film progresses not only a conductor of music, but a conductor of ideas, of energies.

“Feature Film - and it seems important, if a little obvious to stress the self-reflective nature of the title - explores ideas in a way no mainstream feature film has yet done: dissolving a narrative’s atmosphere into its most abstract components, withholding any conclusion, allowing an invisible player to hold centre stage and then never allowing the audience to see the focus of his attention - the orchestra. If Vertigo splits fictions apart, then Feature Film fractures expectations about how film functions. If Vertigo is about people going crazy, then Feature Film demands a kind of generous dis-equilibrium from its audience. Which - considering how much we think we know about film, and how little we see this knowledge put into practice - doesn’t really seem to be asking too much.”