Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon review – a brave glimpse inside the mind of the Scottish artist

Director Finlay Pretsell captures Gordon setting things alight with a miniature blowtorch, smearing himself with silver paint and throwing shapes with a bullwhip

Here is a brave and not entirely orthodox artist documentary; not so much a dates-and-shows-and-talking-heads profile, but resembling something of an act of art in itself. The subject is Douglas Gordon, the Scottish film and video-maker, possibly best known for 24 Hour Psycho, his radically slowed-down presentation of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork, and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, the feature-length film about the legendary French footballer he co-directed with Philippe Pareno – which apart from anything else pioneered the single-player camera that is now a fixture of mainstream TV coverage.

The film’s intention is essentially to put you inside Gordon’s day-to-day wrestling with the act of creativity, and therefore inside his mind; the vast majority of which is spent inside his Berlin warehouse studio, where Gordon cuts a basically solitary figure. Apart from the camera crew of course; Gordon spends a good deal of the film’s running time berating director Finlay Pretsell, in between setting things alight with a miniature blowtorch, smearing himself with silver paint, throwing shapes with a bullwhip and blowing bubbles from a family-size bubble tube.