Visual Arts: Manoeuvres in the dark

Film music goes like this. You see a film, enjoy it, and note the really high quality of its music. You buy a recording of the soundtrack. At first the music is so saturated with the film that it still seems very good. In fact, the music plus the memory of the film seems almost better than the film itself, a pure distillation of its emotional essence. But after a few listenings (five, 50) you start to hear the music as music. You realise, sadly, it won't do. It needed the film. Even though as film music it was very good. Or so, roughly, it has seemed to me since, 30 years ago, I bought my first LP, Ron Goodwin's music for Where Eagles Dare.

Douglas Gordon's installation Feature Film is a tribute to the power of film music, specifically to the power of Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. It's in some ways a powerful piece itself, but I'm not sure quite where the credit should go. Hitchcock's genius clearly needs no telling. And Herrmann's achievement among film composers - Citizen Kane, Psycho, Taxi Driver - is now widely honoured too. Tough collaborators.

You might say that in this year of Hitchcock's centenary, Feature Film is another, but oblique, artistic homage to the master who's received so many. It's certainly a deliberately second-hand, or at-one-remove creation. Visitors to the Atlantis Gallery in Brick Lane, East London, should be aware that, to enjoy it, they need to know Vertigo pretty well. Equally, it's probably important that they don't already know Herrmann's music for it too thoroughly. I'll describe the piece in a moment.

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist in his early thirties and he won the Turner Prize in 1996 - mystifyingly, because he rather obviously wasn't the best artist on that year's shortlist. His work comes in all sorts of forms - photos, text, sound, film - and generally seems to depend on some interesting, quasi-paradoxical thought which isn't quite so interesting when you come to think of it. Whenever I've seen a piece by Gordon, I've always heard the voice of Neil the hippy in The Young Ones going "Oh wow!"

In the present context, the work to mention is an earlier Hitchcock-based thing, Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, in which the famous thriller is projected so slowly that it lasts a full day. I did hear of one person who had watched it all through, but even from a description you can well imagine the thoughts it might occasion about time, action, hope, delay, narrative suspense etc in a cooperative mind. In Feature Film, the cinematic experience is dislocated in another way. The relationship between a film and its music is in effect reversed.

The show goes like this. You enter an enormous darkened chamber - the Atlantis Gallery - the lighting about as low as a cinema's is during a screening. The chamber is filled with orchestral music which broods, swoons, surges, pulses and shudders. A large screen hangs in the middle, showing a film of a man conducting, with tense and flowing hand movements, tossing head and burning eyes - body parts and gestures busily edited in isolated close-ups and smeary slow-motion. The orchestra is never seen. From time to time the music climaxes or calms and comes to stop, and the screen goes blank. After a bit it starts again. Meanwhile, over on a wall in a far corner, there's a small projection of Vertigo itself - but totally silent, just the images.

And here are some useful facts. This is a complete, note for note, re- recording of Herrmann's score, from an orchestral performance conducted by James Conlon, who was filmed in the act. What's more, the music was performed in synch with its occurrence on the original soundtrack, and played back here in synch with the silent screening (hence the pauses).

So visiting this show you have a choice - a choice of synchronisations. Either you look at the main feature with the conductor, and hear the music as an odd and interrupted sort of orchestral performance. Or you look at the small, silent projection and hear it as a film soundtrack (albeit as a pure music track, with no dialogue or sound effects).

Or there is a third choice, which is not to look at either projection, simply to move around in this big space and lose yourself in the music, the darkness and the memory of the film. The music is certainly the most immediately involving thing. And the best time I had at Feature Film was doing just that - treating the sound from the mighty, loudspeakers and the great big darkened space as a kind of public head-set, an enormous Walkman, and reliving, via the music, the hysterical romance of Hitchcock's over-egged psychological thriller. As a facility for a kind of wakeful dreaming, Feature Film provides a good and rare public service.

Vertigo lends itself beautifully, and yet oddly, to this proxy experience. The film is itself so dependent on Herrmann's heady melange of Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Indeed, it needs the music to stop it from being a clinical horror - a film in which, essentially, a madman (played by James Stewart) obsessively pursues a zombie (played by Kim Novak) to death. Herrmann's music glosses this rather deranged, necrophiliac story as a grand, tragic passion. It redeems, or at least relieves, its potential cruelty and repulsiveness. And so, getting the music neat, you don't just get an intense distillation of the film; you get a more attractive version of it.

So that was a good time, and it lasted about half an hour, and then various factors brought it to an end. One was starting to look at the film of James Conlon conducting - which is the only thing here that's all Gordon's own work - and thinking: all films of conductors are dreadful, and this one, though it tries to dramatise the conducting body in interesting ways, doesn't escape the general truth on which so many classical music televisings have foundered.

Another factor was realising the elaborate conceptual scheme of the piece - the double synchronisation, the splitting of music as soundtrack from music as music, the reversal of priority - and feeling that it was pointlessly elaborate, because it didn't really add to the thoughts one might have about the relations of films and their music anyway.

There was the realisation, besides, that the work was obviously very turned on by general ideas about setting experiences at a remove and dismantling fictions, about signs and traces, and presences and absences and simulations - in short, by an intellectual agenda which has been banging around in the visual arts for about 15 years, and amazingly still gets people going, but not me though.

And there was the suspicion that the whole thing was sustained by a formula cleverly using the words "dependency" and "control" - the mutual dependency/control of film and film music, a film about emotional dependency and control, the conductor both leading and possessed by the music, a new artwork that's largely dependent on an old film, while controlling our perception of that old film. All sort of true enough in the saying, but not really made felt, save in one way.

Namely, the inevitable sad dependency of all film music that's specifically written as film music, and that includes the best film music that's ever been written, and the inevitable moment when that dependency fails, when, as music, it becomes intolerable. It happened for me about 50 minutes in, with the thought that I just could not listen to Herrmann's driving, Ravel-ly, mad waltz motif one more time, and I was gone.

Douglas Gordon: `Feature Film'. Atlantis Gallery, 146 Brick Lane, London E1; until 3 May. Sun-Wed noon-9pm; Thur-Sat noon-to midnight. Free admission