24 Hour Psycho
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''24 Hour Psycho'' is a 1993 art installation video by Scottish artist
Douglas Gordon Douglas Gordon (born 20 September 1966) is a Scottish artist. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Work Much of Gordon's ...
. It is an appropriation of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 psychological thriller film '' Psycho'', slowed down to approximately two frames per second from its original 24. As a result, the film lasts for precisely 24 hours, rather than the original
running time In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by t ...
of 109 minutes (1 hour, 49 minutes). First shown in 1993 at Tramway Art Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, and at the
Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art The KW Institute for Contemporary Art (also known as Kunst-Werke) is a contemporary art institution located in Auguststraße 69 in Berlin-Mitte, Germany. Klaus Biesenbach was the founding director of KW; the current director is Krist Gruijthuijs ...
in
Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
, Germany, ''24 Hour Psycho'' was Gordon's first work to showcase his theme of repetition. In 2008, Gordon created a second installation entitled ''24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro'', which consists of two simultaneous projections of ''24 Hour Psycho'' placed side-by-side. One projection plays the film normally while the other plays it in reverse, briefly culminating in a convergence at the centre for an identical shot.


Synopsis

An art installation, ''24 hour Psycho'' consists entirely of an appropriation of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 psychological thriller film '' Psycho'', slowed down to approximately two frames per second from its original 24. As a result, the film lasts for precisely 24 hours, rather than the original
running time In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by t ...
of 109 minutes (1 hour, 49 minutes). There is no audio. The installation is displayed at the centre of a dark room and projected onto a translucent screen so that it may be viewed from either side.


Production

Douglas Gordon Douglas Gordon (born 20 September 1966) is a Scottish artist. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Work Much of Gordon's ...
is a Scottish artist known for his use of
conceptual art Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...
and repetition in his work. He often uses scenes from other films to create his
video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...
. ''24 Hour Psycho'' was his first work to use such repetition. Gordon saw ''Psycho'' for the first time in 1989 out of boredom. During his viewing, he thought he saw something that he could not have possibly seen, and rewatched the film repeatedly—including in slow motion. This, which Gordon calls an "active curiosity", inspired him to create ''24 Hour Psycho''. To create the film, Gordon used a VHS tape of ''Psycho'' and played it through a
cassette deck A cassette deck is a type of tape machine for playing and recording audio cassettes that does not have a built-in power amplifier or speakers, and serves primarily as a transport. It can be a part of an automotive entertainment system, a part of ...
that possessed the ability to slow play videos to an extreme capacity. Reflecting on ''24 Hour Psycho'' in 2010, Gordon says that his tenacity is what made the project happen. He was assisted by several artists who tried to work out how to make the film, with the first cost estimate being three times the budget of ''Psycho''. But Gordon found "fantastic contacts" in
Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...
that made him able to make the idea come to fruition. ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' writes that as Gordon's first film, ''24 Hour Psycho'' introduced several important themes in his future work: "recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light." Gordon regards ''24 Hour Psycho'' not as an appropriation, but more as an "affiliation", stating that it was not simply a case of abduction. He regards ''Psycho'' (1960) as a masterpiece in its own right, and wanted to maintain Hitchcock's authorship in his work. As such, he further states that he hopes when people watch ''24 Hour Psycho'' they give Hitchcock significantly more consideration than himself.


Release and reception

''24 Hour Psycho'' was first shown in 1993 at Tramway Art Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, and at the
Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art The KW Institute for Contemporary Art (also known as Kunst-Werke) is a contemporary art institution located in Auguststraße 69 in Berlin-Mitte, Germany. Klaus Biesenbach was the founding director of KW; the current director is Krist Gruijthuijs ...
in
Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
, Germany. For its Berlin screening, the film was shown via a
VCR A videocassette recorder (VCR) or video recorder is an electromechanical device that records analog audio and analog video from broadcast television or other source on a removable, magnetic tape videocassette, and can play back the recording. ...
equipped with a shuttle control to allow for it to play in extreme slow motion. It was displayed on a translucent screen and leaned against one of the room's pillars for support. In contrast to ''Psycho''—which did not allow late admissions upon Hitchcock's request—viewers may enter and exit the exhibition for ''24 Hour Psycho'' at will. In 2006, Ken Johnson of ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' wrote that although few people have seen ''24 Hour Psycho'', "and hardly anyone has sat through the whole thing, Douglas Gordon's ''24 Hour Psycho'' has become one of those mythic monuments that embody the dreams, anxieties and aspirations of a generation." Brian Price, writing for
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
, bemoaned in 2010 that the select showings of ''24 Hour Psycho'' made it a privilege to see rather than an amazement, calling it "limited-access cinema". Katrina M. Brown, writing for the ''Gagosian Quarterly'' in 2018, wrote that because of the widespread public knowledge of ''Psycho'' (1960), no one would have to watch ''24 Hours of Psycho'' to find out what happens in the film, "so the viewing xperiencebecomes inextricably connected to memory, be it accurate or fallible." Brown further calls ''24 Hour Psycho'' an "audacious move", saying that while the film is "often talked about as sculpture," the actual viewing experience of the film is "undoubtedly spatial, but also intensely visual: there is, of course, no sound in the work, though several people seem to recall hearing it—an apt trick of memory, perhaps." Brown also notes that the renown of ''24 Hour Psycho'' makes it a substantial part of Douglas' work; it has been widely exhibited "all over the world" and is "regularly cited as a key work of the 1990s."


Aftermath

Gordon's ''5 Year Drive-By'' (1995)—which slows down ''
The Searchers ''The Searchers'' is a 1956 American Technicolor VistaVision epic Western film directed by John Ford and written by Frank S. Nugent, based on the 1954 novel by Alan Le May. It is set during the Texas-Native American wars, and stars John W ...
'' (1956) to a length of five years—was described by him as "something of a companion piece" to ''24 Hour Psycho''. In 2008, Gordon created a second installation entitled ''24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro'', which consists of two simultaneous projections of ''24 Hour Psycho'' placed side-by-side. One projection plays the film normally while the other, mirrored projection plays it in reverse, briefly culminating in a convergence at the centre for an identical mirrored shot. Brown notes that this results in unpredictable—yet "remarkable"—juxtapositions and tension, because "what has happened before will also happen in the future, and, of course, vice versa." The 2010 short novel '' Point Omega'' by American author
Don DeLillo Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, perf ...
heavily references ''24 Hour Psycho'', and uses it as a
framing device Framing may refer to: * Framing (construction), common carpentry work * Framing (law), providing false evidence or testimony to prove someone guilty of a crime * Framing (social sciences) * Framing (visual arts), a technique used to bring the focu ...
. In it, DeLillo is mesmerised by the "radically altered plane of time", noting "The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw." The book both begins and ends with ''24 Hour Psycho''.


Themes and analysis

For Christine Ross, ''24 Hour Psycho'' plays out "the loss of time, the need for time, and the institutional depreciation of time". Ross writes that by replicating ''Psycho'' in extreme slow motion and removing the audio, ''24 Hour Psycho'' changes the original narrative of the film so much that one's "memory and perception clash over the reconstruction of the film" as "the viewer fails to recreate the original story." As most viewers will likely have at least heard of ''Psycho'', the audience's perception of ''24 Hour Psycho'' is dictated by mental processes that each involve
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered ...
, like "remembrance, recall, expectation, and anticipation." However, the slow motion makes ''Psycho'' difficult to recall, as it amplifies more details and editing techniques for the audience to perceive, yet it simultaneously dissolves the original film's narrative structure to the point where "more often than not, there is nothing to see." Ross further adds that—in relation to cognitive science—the slow motion brings the viewer into a state of "perceptual and memory insufficiency" as even though the viewer can anticipate what will happen next, the slowed extended duration prevents one's memory from matching the images to ''Psycho'', making it hard for the viewer to grasp the narrative. Thus, the viewer "becomes depressed and inhibited in their perceptual activity." Philip Monk writes that, despite ''Psychos familiarity, the extreme slowness nevertheless makes the plot incomprehensible and unable to match-up with one's memory nor concept of time, at the same time freeing the viewer from the film's time. He writes that ''24 Hour Psycho'' diverts the audience from the traditional pattern of watching films by nullifying time all together in ''24 Hour Psycho'', endlessly postponing the "catharsis associated with this genre of entertainment" and complicating the audience's perception of time. ''24 Hour Psycho'' instead subjects the characters of Hitchcock's film to a "celluloid prison where they are condemned to attend their fate in a slow-motion trap." Monk further adds that ''24 Hour Psycho'' simulates the psychological disturbance and madness of
Norman Bates Norman Bates is a fictional character created by American author Robert Bloch as the main antagonist in his 1959 thriller novel '' Psycho''. He has an alter, Mother, who takes from the form of his abusive mother, and later victim, Norma, wh ...
; while Hitchcock's film shows the madness of Bates before the psychologist at the end of the film explains his mental disturbance, ''24 Hour Psycho'' "actualises it" by making his madness visible instead of referring to it. By muting the sound, Gordon accomplishes in ''24 hour Psycho'' what "Hitchcock perhaps intended as a cinematic trope: to show Norman's madness by sight" alone. Klaus Pieter Biesenbach writes that "duration is immeasurable" and has its own "inner rhythm", saying that the more detailed a memory of a certain period, the longer it seems to have been. To Biesenbach, ''24 Hour Psycho'' intensifies this quality by exposing ''Psychos subliminal moments as all theatrical elements—noting suspense and climax—become obsolete. He argues that the scale and size of films matter, writing that today most classical films are seen at home rather than in the cinema, but Gordon rescales such films close to their original presentation size by usually exhibiting them on "ten-by-twelve-foot screens" when exhibiting his artwork in museums and art galleries. Biesenbach also adds that viewers of ''24 Hour Psycho'' would attempt to compare their memories of the original film to Gordon's artwork, which "so explicitly alludes to the idea of life as a storyboard, containing suspense and unexpected turns that occur according to the commonly understood logic of the psychoanalysed human being." Laura Mulvey writes that ''24 Hour Psycho'' represents the rise of
home video Home video is prerecorded media sold or rented for home viewing. The term originates from the VHS and Betamax era, when the predominant medium was videotapes, but has carried over to optical disc formats such as DVD, Blu-ray and streaming me ...
, calling it a "celebration" of the new options that films on home media offer—such as playback speed. She notes that anyone who wishes can now "play with the film image and, perhaps, in the process, evolve
voyeurism Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions of a private nature. The term comes from the French ''voir'' which means "to see". ...
and investment in spectacle into something closer to fetishism and investment in repetition, detail and personal obsession", just as Gordon had done.


See also

*
List of longest films This list of longest films is composed of films with a running time of 300 minutes (5 hours) or more. Cinematic films Note: Some releases are extended cuts or director's cuts, and are ranked according to the longest verified running time. Expe ...


References


Bibliography

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External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:24 Hour Psycho 1990s British films 1993 films Alternative versions of films British avant-garde and experimental films British black-and-white films British contemporary works of art British independent films British silent feature films Psycho (franchise) Young British Artists