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Reel time
The return of
the minute man

by
Rebecca
Mazzei
12/13/2006
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Pink dress, pink dress, a
couple of taxidermied animals, and one concrete-blond Anne Heche
looking bored, bummed and dead: That's what, near as I can tell, can
be made out of this 60-second remake of Psycho on speed. If you
shift your eyes even just for a second away from artist Douglas
Gordon's new and improved version of the film, you'll miss Marion
Crane's wet cheek kissing the bathroom floor. One-Minute Psycho
is Gordon's follow up to his Turner Prize-winning work from 1996,
24 Hour Psycho, which first played for a whole entire day at
Glasgow's Tramway theater. He seriously slowed down Hitchcock's
seminal black-and-white 1960 masterpiece about a murderous mamma's
boy, transforming the event into a psychodrama-rama that perhaps
belabored the point, but built up to a better climax — one that lasts
a while. Slowing the film caused some critical controversy simply
because Gordon was messing with a master; but in a way, his piece was
an homage to Hitchcock because it accurately reflected the painstaking
production and post-production process necessary to create a work of
art — especially one of that caliber — in which sound supplies its own
fully-developed narrative and any given 60-second shot probably took
about a day to deal with.
Gordon says "24 Hour Psycho showed you can't always
appropriate ... It's not going to be great art simply by association,"
but sometimes an appropriation is more appropriate. This is a point he
proves with his new piece. One-Minute Psycho is Cliffs Notes
for a terribly long and shitty Gus Van Sant indulgence, a shot-by-shot
remake that won the "worst movie" Razzie in 1998. Even though the
original thriller was shot in black and white after color film had
been invented, Van Sant thought it best to brighten up the story. As a
result, the pivotal close-up of bloody water spinning down the drain
looked more like a turbulent yet tasty bowl of fruit punch. Gordon's
condensed revision, like so many of history's revisions, is welcome.
Who on earth would want to watch more than a minute of Vince Vaughn
and Heche on the big screen anyway? And Gordon's new movie proves
Freud was on to something — almost all images of death, artistic or
awful, inspire anxiety about our own mortality, even if they flash
onscreen for a second. Powerful pictures stand the test of time. Spare
a few minutes for the premiere from 3 to 6 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 16.
The show runs through January 24 at the Museum of New Art, 7. N.
Saginaw, Pontiac; 248-210-7560.

Rebecca Mazzei is the arts editor of Metro Times.
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