Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Lansdowne Productions and the Scottish Documentary Institute gathered together some of the most talented filmmakers and visual artists based in Scotland. Collectively they created the feature length documentary, the New Ten Commandments. This short, The Right not to be Tortured is one of those commandments.

A cinematic experience by Douglas Gordon - in which the film D.O.A. is screened simultaneously on three screens beside one another, but at slightly different speeds. The films quickly fall out of synch with one another. Déjà-vu uses footage from D.O.A. 1949-50, a Hollywood thriller directed by Rudolph Mateé. The film has been transferred to video and is projected simultaneously on three parallel screens at normal speed as well as slightly faster and slightly slower - 25, 24 and 23 frames per second (left to right). This has the effect of making the three identical narratives diverge increasingly over time, and inducing in the viewer an experience similar to déjà-vu.

A cinematic backdrop, created by Douglas Gordon, for Rufus Wainwright, in which the singer's eyes are filmed in slow motion and overlapped. The film is shown here accompanied by Wainwright's Sonnet 10 - but the film was also shown as a video backdrop during the singer's live concerts.

24 Hour Psycho is the title of an art installation created by artist Douglas Gordon in 1993. The work consists entirely of an appropriation of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho slowed down to approximately two frames a second, rather than the usual 24. As a result it lasts for exactly 24 hours, rather than the original 109 minutes. The film was an important work in Gordon's early career, and is said to introduce themes common to his work, such as "recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light."

The film was produced by Nick Higgins from Lansdowne Productions and Noémie Mendelle from the Scottish Documentary Institute and has 10 film-chapter directors for each of the 10 chapters of the film. The film's unifying theme is human rights in Scotland with each chapter illustrating one of the "New Ten Commandments" - 10 articles chosen from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 10 film chapters of The New Ten Commandments 1. The Right to Freedom of Assembly - Dir, David Graham Scott 2. The Right not to be enslaved - Dir, Nick Higgins 3. The Right to a fair trial - Dir, Sana Bilgrami 4. The Right to freedom of expression - Dir, Doug Aubrey 5. The Right to life - Dir, Kenny Glenaan 6. The Right to liberty - Dir, Irvine Welsh & Mark Cousins 7. The Right not to be tortured - Dir, Douglas Gordon 8. The Right to asylum - Dir, Anna Jones 9. The Right to privacy - Dir, Alice Nelson 10. The Right to freedom of thought - Dir, Mark Cousins & Tilda Swinton.

Avri Levitan and Roi Shiloah are a pair of acclaimed classical musicians from Israel who were booked to play a special concert in Poland, performing Mozart's "Concert Symphony in E-Flat Major" with one of the nation's leading orchestras, the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of the Polish Radio. However, the two musicians chose an unusual route to get there -- viola player Levitan and violinist Shiloah took the train from Berlin to Warsaw, in effect following the same path their parents were forced to use when they were sent to the Third Reich's death camps in 1939. Filmmaker Douglas Gordon and his camera crew were on hand for the trip, and K.364: A Journey By Train is a documentary that contrasts the beauty of Mozart's music and the enthusiasm of two world class musicians with the legacy of one of the darkest episodes in human history.

I Had Nowhere To Go is based on Jonas Mekas’s diary. It’s been over 70 years since he left his village in Lithuania to escape Nazi persecution. He was 22 years old. Today he is one of the last surviving members of a displaced generation and one of the greatest documenters of the human experience.

Domestic (as long as it lasts) was made in 2002 in Gordon’s one-bedroom apartment in downtown New York City. It shows the artist’s foot repeatedly kicking the camera around a clean, quiet domestic space until the video blacks out. The victim of the booting, the camera itself, is recording the footage we see. The viewer is disoriented by the film’s upsetting of the conventional relationship between documenting and participating, which makes the camera complicit in the act.

AnnLee, a manga character originally created as a silent one-dimensional extra, reveals her voice.

Stories are Propaganda was created by Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija for the Guangzhou Biennial in China. The artists documented the new city under construction on the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou. A succession of fixed shots show black factory smoke, piles of trash, words written in the sand, and trees swaying in the wind. Flowing rapidly from general observations of the era to autobiographical details to self-reflection, poetic fragments unroll like snapshots: a Chinese magician making watches and clocks appear at night; a small albino rabbit floundering in a muddy puddle; a snowman made of mud; a shadow puppet silhouetted against the moon. Narrated by a child off-screen, the film creates a feeling of melancholy through its evocation of the end of the world’s ideologies. It is an inverted cinema made of scenes edited according to a temporal protocol.

Anywhen In a Time Colored Space is a continuation of Philippe Parreno's Anywhen, filmed by renowned Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji and featuring the voice of Nina Conti, actor, comedienne and ventriloquist. Performing the artist’s own writing integrated with fragments of James Joyce, the amalgamation of words read by Conti makes explicit Parreno’s interest in artificial, digital, and organic matter, and particularly how these forms of life communicate. The film is comprised of long sequences of a live cuttlefish (Sepia Oficinalis — a Mediterranean species of cephalopod) that can change the surface of its body—responding to outside forces such as light, sound and vibration, seemingly projecting the thoughts contained in the monologue. Much of the film focuses on the cuttlefish, which Parreno first kept in a tank in his studio.

Directed by Philippe Parreno (1987)

A portrait of a ghost, Marilyn Monroe. The film conjures her with a phantasmagoric seance in the suite at the hotel Waldorf Astoria in New York where she lived in the 1950s. Her presence is reproduced by three algorithms: the camera becomes her eyes, a computer reconstructs the prosody of her voice and a robot recreates her handwriting. The dead is incarnated in an image.

This feature-length film combines 20 years of existing and re-edited footage to generate a 'film of films'; a hybrid that is both a non-exhaustive retrospective and the creation of a new persona through the symbiosis of its constituent parts. In the past decades, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition experience by conceiving this as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. Now he explores the possibilities of the theatrical film screening as a coherent ’object’ rather than a collection of individual films. For the first time, Parreno presents a retrospective of his film works in the diegetic space of the cinema instead of the museum space. Parreno proposes a 'seance of cinema’ reintroducing in this traditional setting the magic and live rituals that lie at the basis of this art form.

“Le Pont du Trieur”, co-written by de Meaux and Philippe Parreno, with an original score by Dave Stewart, is set in Pamir, a region situated in the highest part of Tajikistan, at the border between Afghanistan and China. This is a strategic zone controlled by various armies in the midst of a region that awaits reconstruction. The film stems from the simple question of how to tell the story of a country of which the West is deprived of images. Both fiction and documentary, it is about reality and the means of telling it.

C.H.Z. ("Continuously Habitable Zones") is linked to a territory. The film gives perspective to a black garden constructed in Portugal. A landscape produced a film, and a film produced a landscape. The landscape is perennial; it is what the image rejects.

A film which reenacts images taken by Paul Fusco of the train voyage that transported Robert Kennedy’s corpse from New York to Washington D.C. on June 8, 1968. The film takes the point of view of the dead, a tracking shot moves through rural and urban American landscapes. People who have come to pay their respects line the tracks, staring as if in an immobile trance.

A portrait of an illegal immigrant Chinese child through the imaginary monsters that incarnate his fears and anxieties. A fiction tacked onto a reality. The reality of the illegal aliens in Manhattan’s Chinatown. People who are called ‘invisible’. This portrait gives an image to someone who doesn’t have one and, at the same time, a real person gains the social identity he’s missing by becoming a fictional character. High definition images make sensible impressions of a city as we cross over to the imaginary. Fantasy and social realism, fiction and documentary overlap. Like Superman or Spiderman, Invisible Boy is a contemporary superhero produced by the city today. His monsters appear slowly, at the beginning as scratches on the film stock, someplace in between the diegesis and the actual world. They are the boy’s superpowers. This is a tale in which a boy’s paranoia produces a topographic vision of a city.