Reflections on a Red Boat: Editing Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon

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During the editing of Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon, I found three principles from Douglas' art mirrored my own work: gathering, noticing and discovery. Like much of Douglas' art, these principles start from a simple basis, but lead the mind off on circuitous paths to the profound. In a monologue near the beginning of the film, Douglas explains his studio as a locus of artistic gathering, most visible in the form of words and phrases scribbled on his studio kitchen wall - for example "west end girls", "they got what they deserved" and perhaps the crux of the film "close your eyes, see how it feels". These scraps of meaning are pulled from conversations around his kitchen table and, as Douglas explains, might become significant pieces in neon or "in a form that hasn't been invented yet." These words and phrases sit in his head and on his walls, their significance not yet fulfilled, until something clicks and they become the basis for visual art, a process that Douglas says can take decades. This act of noticing the insignificant and making it significant becomes important later in the film, when Douglas expresses the influence of the repeated sample at the core of the composition Jesus Blood Never Failed Me by Gavin Bryars. Douglas says this exemplifies the practice of noticing - in this case, Bryars’ attention to the plaintive singing of a man living rough in London. The singing, from someone ignored by society, becomes the centre point of orchestral arrangement, the voice and the person singing becoming significant.

These processes of noticing and gathering are the two steps along a path of discovery, which Douglas expresses as a kind of oneiric mind state in opposition to excessive rationality imposed by some elements of society, in a diatribe against a "psy-fucking-chia-fucking-trist" who once said he was "living in a dreamworld". There's an obvious absurdity in criticising a conceptual artist for living in a dreamworld, and I think the audience is probably sympathetic to Douglas when he says that he went to art school "to say fuck you" to such people, those who don't take a chance on "discovery".

In the edit, the image chosen to convey Douglas' mindset at this point in the film was a red boat bobbing on the water from his 1995 video artwork Remote Viewing 13.05.94 (Horror Movie). When I first saw this work amongst the archive, I was struck by its power but couldn't articulate exactly why I found it so stirring. When constructing this particular sequence, however, the image seemed to contain the right conceptual and emotional meaning to communicate the mind of Douglas at that stage of the story. A vivid but lonely object, held but still moving, on an unknown body of shimmering water. It comes within a montage of Douglas' work (bloodshot eyes, a deliriously strobing Glasgow chip shop, red curtains blowing, fingers beckoning) which aims to sync up the viewer’s mind with that of Douglas at this key moment in his emotional journey. Crucially, these images appear not as a reference to a specific phase of Gordon's practice (their chronology and origin undefined) but function purely as emotional and psychological storytelling devices. The means by which I came upon these images and selected it for this purpose was the process of gathering, noticing and discovery.

This is essentially what editing is, or should be. You gather material, in this case the collective video work of Douglas Gordon, you watch it over and over and try to notice what significance lies behind the presentation, how it makes you feel and think in the moment and across the editing process, and you open yourself to the Gordonian sense of discovery. You often just throw things against the timeline and see what sticks - similar to how, in the film, Douglas drops a lightbulb, which won’t screw into its socket, that smashes against a mirror on the floor in a moment of sudden and improvisational creative destruction that surprises even him.

A more conventional edit might use the red boat to illustrate a specific period or style of Douglas' work. Maybe the red boat meant something to Douglas when he made it and could elucidate his working life when he created this image or chart the course of his artistic development? I don’t find that particularly interesting or dramatic. What can be dramatic, though, is to follow Douglas' state of mind through the course of the film's conflicts - at this point, he is at the end of his tether, stuck between rational responsibilities and the creative chaos of his art, and a few scenes later he's going to declare he no longer wants to continue to live life this way - and use associative imagery as emotionally expressive beats that add weight to his words, not simply explain or illustrate them. As Douglas states, the psy-fucking-chia-fucking-trist (representative of anyone who ever stood in the way of his artistic impulse) needs to "go to sleep" and "ask themselves who [they] are". The audience needs to do the same, to go with Douglas into the limbic land of associative waking dreams that forms the crucible of his art.

Dreaming is the most pure gathering, noticing and discovery that we're capable of - our brain surprises itself with images and sounds from our waking life and reconfigures them into a new order that may allow us to process our emotions and actions in ways that our conscious mind prevents us. Fellini once said in an interview for Rolling Stone that “talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams... that solemn, almost religious ritual of stepping into the realm of visions, as when you go to sleep and start to dream." When editing is closer to a dream state than a waking state, a film can open up in miraculous ways, as the audience is given associative free rein to react, connect and question the visuals without being tethered to some rational course of images, events or explanation. For me, the rational world of the psy-fucking-chia-fucking-trist is this anchor of factual editing holding down so much documentary; so afraid of the risks of open discovery that it would rather bore an audience into an obedient stupor than bore into the empathetic mind of subject and viewer.

I felt the red boat needed to be there because listening to Douglas' words and looking at the red boat on the water made me feel like I believe Douglas' felt when he said the word “discovery”. Douglas likely wasn't thinking of a red boat when he said the word, but when I hear him say it and see the red boat I feel as if I can think like Douglas. Although there's a nudge in a direction from the succession of images, their rhythm and prominence, as well as the associated speech, there's no intention that every viewer should feel exactly the same way. The image and its partners could strike them differently, and that's not only fine but desirable.

A thought that recurred often during this edit was how little I cared for the overwhelming majority of documentaries about artists. I have only ever seen a small handful of such films that come close to the experience of the art itself. Great artists exist in a world of pure subjective expression, a fascinating place they invite us to enter where we simultaneously try to connect with their mind and go deeper into our own. But what are the three most common modes in art documentaries? Either sit down interviews, the realistic representation of the artist at work in actuality/archive, or a series of appeals to authority from experts and familiars - usually some mixture of all three. While these techniques can be illuminating, they are often supposed to reach some kind of profundity through sheer accumulation, but end up feeling like a celebratory confetti of facts to distract the audience from realising they haven’t experienced anything of substance. It's like being walked into a gallery and having your head thrust straight at the blurb on the walls. Turn your head instead to any portrait in that gallery and you’ll see a poetic rendering of the external that exposes the internal, not the presentation of the external in and of itself.

Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon is not just a portrait of the artist as we see him, but also of his way of thinking, feeling and looking - a vision of what Douglas sees when he closes his eyes. His work is never deployed to explain or historicise, but summoned when it can immerse us in his psychology or convey his emotions. When Douglas is asked why he does the things he does - burn, destroy, copy and manipulate - it isn't Finlay the director that asks, or some academic insight from a talking head, but Douglas' daughter. The answer he gives isn't as an artist, but as a father. When Douglas and Finlay argue about the making of the film, we don't hear from someone else as to Douglas' temper and complex relationship with the documentation of his life, we see Douglas blowing children's bubbles out the window and cut to archive of him taping his face into distortion for his 1996 piece The Making of Monster. That's the film trying to get into your head through Douglas' head. The film is about, as Douglas says, "the things people don't know that are important to [him]", and what is important to the subject of a documentary is not, despite its dominance in the form, the facts of their lives, but rather the inner workings of their mind and perception.

Ask yourself what you would most like the world to understand about you, and I'm sure you won't think of some fact that can be observed externally, but will instead land on some thought or feeling that, although significant to your sense of self, you struggle to have acknowledged by others. This, I think, is what Douglas is playing with when he harangues Finlay at the start of the film about not knowing his middle name, or the day of the week he was born. He knows full well that far too many documentaries, as suspenseful and sensational as they can be, are obsessed with a logical sequencing of events and the supposed clarity of external observations - closer to a dramatic reading of Wikipedia than true cinema. What people don't know, and what I truly believe they long for in non-fiction as they do in fiction, is the answer to a question Douglas loves to be asked - "what did you dream?" The answer is inevitably a boat ride of discovery.

With Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon premiering at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival in Panorama Dokumente, I’m excited to see how audiences respond to this shared dream state.