Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon Berlinale 2026 Review Roundup (and a bit of art & politics)

Douglas Gordon had a fabulous premiere at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele for the 76th Berlinale.
Following on from that was a selection of very enthusiastic reviews:

“Decidedly low-fi, loud, brash and clearly intentionally chaotic but with a clear narrative arc, crafted by editor Kieran Gosney” — Vladan Petkovic, Cineuropa
“Seamlessly interweaves spontaneous actions, everyday moments, and performative poses… the rigorous condensation of hundreds of hours of footage heightens the inner tension of the deliberately raw visuals” — Lida Bach, Moviebreak.de
"...the most significant film at the Berlinale... The film captivated my senses and left me inconsolably excited" — Martin Razhdashki in Atrakcia
“Watch this extraordinary film full of music… wonderful!” — Tue Steen Müller, filmkommentaren.dk
“The director has gone deep into the belly of the beast… as close as you can come to watching a major artist in full flow.” — Geoffrey Macnab, Business Doc Europe
“Moments of authenticity and directness… that hardly any film at this Berlinale has reached.” — Art in Berlin
“Quite surprising, intimate, and avant-garde… its resonance is profound.” — Kim Hyo-jeong, film critic


Political battles and the furore over Berlinale’s piss-poor stance on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians (free Palestine, obviously) meant that the light shon more brightly on explicitly political films that spoke to currently identifiable issues in the news media (what people like to call “urgent” and I often think of as more “undeveloped”) leaving little focus for films like Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon. This film is, of course, also political - as all art is political - but in more subtle ways.

A working class Scottish artist, who broke barriers to become both infatuated and cursed by the gaze of the London-centric art world, battling with the documentation of his life and stuck within the whirling personas he’s built for himself, while the Intractable tug of competing responsibilities tears at him. Is it the crucible of great art for artists like Douglas to live a childlike libertarian art-life, as argued by Herbert Read in To Hell With Culture, or do Douglas’ responsibilities as a parent supersede that? What is our moral responsibility as observers of art, when the production of that art involves psychological toil and suffering? Should we let artists battle their demons in their studio as long as the product enhances the beauty of the world, or is there a duty of care to protect artists' minds from themselves?

I remember a context studies class in art college, in which the lecturer criticised the idea that art must be born through suffering. We then proceeded to read an extract from Eat, Pray, Love… While I think art can be born from joy as well as suffering, I countered by saying I would rather read Ernest Hemingway or Sylvia Plath than Elizabeth Gilbert, and frankly it’s like comparing apples and apple-flavoured bubblegum. Is suffering a necessity? No, but frequently the drive to create great art gets tangled in the vines of self-destruction, and sometimes that’s the only path it can take. This is the most intimate politics of art, because when you walk into a gallery to marvel at a work of art, you might be witnessing the psychological torment of a real individual. Although the shared distress might lessen your own, you get to exit through the gift shop and go home - the artist’s pain is still up there on the plinths and walls, and in their mind, forever.

I don’t know the answer to any of this, but I know that Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon depicts these questions in a fresh and dynamic vision, and gets underneath the polished exterior of modern art in ways that an endless parade of artist documentaries, magazine articles and biographies have papered over with platitudes. The punk attitude of the film against those platitudes is political in itself, as I see the art world threatened by not just economic destruction, but the destruction of the complexity and radical empathy which is at its core - replaced with simplification, commodification and authoritarianism.

I’m glad “art is political” was the rallying cry that came out of Berlinale, but I worry about the idea that art must wear politics on its sleeve. If all art is political, we need to find ways to articulate politics not just through explicit messaging, but also through poetry, surreality, abstraction, and contradiction - or any other indirect route through hearts and minds. The purest art is in conveying the ineffable, and the endless 24 hour news cycle and social media tsunami shows us that explicit political messaging is persistently effable. There are political nuances to individual experience beyond the headlines. As individual pain and dehumanisation is the end result of the corruption and failure of politics, so then must the creative expression of the depth of that pain and human experience be considered of equal ‘urgency’ as the direct critique of the politics that led them there.

Life is politics, basically, but you don’t just go to a gallery
and put the words ‘art’ and ‘politics’ on the wall. An artwork should
point in more than one direction, not be this sort of placating,
self-demonstrating, witnessing element. It is not important to convince
people; they should convince themselves, they should look with their
own eyes. A painting is not this type of bucket spiel that you deliver.
It is far more complicated than that.

- Luc Tuymans in Art Review