The conceit of the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 1993 film “24 Hour Psycho” is simple: the movie Psycho, slowed down to play at two frames per second, an arduous pace that stretches Hitchcock’s masterpiece out to fill an entire day. Point Omega—one of the set of compact, philosophical novels Don DeLillo has occupied himself with over the past two decades—opens in 2006, when “24 Hour Psycho” was installed at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. DeLillo describes a man who has taken up residence in the room where the film is being shown, closely monitoring both the stop-motion pace of the projected action and the much quicker ebb and flow of visitors to the gallery, few of whom pause to watch for more than a few minutes. The man has become obsessed with how the film renders Anthony Perkins turning his head “not like the flight of an arrow or a bird,” but rather “like bricks in a wall, clearly countable.”
Driven to Distraction
Driven to Distraction
Driven to Distraction
The conceit of the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 1993 film “24 Hour Psycho” is simple: the movie Psycho, slowed down to play at two frames per second, an arduous pace that stretches Hitchcock’s masterpiece out to fill an entire day. Point Omega—one of the set of compact, philosophical novels Don DeLillo has occupied himself with over the past two decades—opens in 2006, when “24 Hour Psycho” was installed at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. DeLillo describes a man who has taken up residence in the room where the film is being shown, closely monitoring both the stop-motion pace of the projected action and the much quicker ebb and flow of visitors to the gallery, few of whom pause to watch for more than a few minutes. The man has become obsessed with how the film renders Anthony Perkins turning his head “not like the flight of an arrow or a bird,” but rather “like bricks in a wall, clearly countable.”