Through a looking glass

Through a Looking Glass features the legendary scene of Robert De Niro talking to himself in his mirror in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Douglas Gordon puts two screens playing the clip opposite each other. One shows the scene at normal speed, the other backwards and slightly slowed down. He analyses and cancels out the film’s narrative dimension by making elements of its syntax visible.

De-synchronizing the two films triggers a vertigo effect in the viewer echoing the schizophrenic hero's loss of control. The installation aims to describe how the mind works and becomes a paranoid, delusional machine.

Gordon's installation Through a Looking Glass, which is in the Pinault Collection, was presented for the first time in 2008 at the Tri Postal in Lille during the “Passage du Temps” (“Passage of Time”) show.