Steve Mcqueen Essay

An example can be seen in Steve McQueen’s Deadpan (1997), shown in a ‘black box’ installation space covering a wall entirely, from floor to ceiling. The black & white film scene presents McQueen re-staging a scene from the Buster Keaton silent movie Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). He stands still with his back to a wall of a house that slowly falls toward him, that leaves him unhurt due to a window space in the wall that falls accurately over the place where he stands. The installation has been designed so that the lower edge of the projected film is flush with the floor of the intervention space, so that it looks as though the wall of the house were actually falling into the room where the viewer stands, that is to say, falling ‘out’ of the projected space. The silent four minute uninterrupted loop splits the perspective throughout a sequence of shots taken from different angles, combined with dramatic composition and an ever increasing speed of the falling wall to cause the viewer to become progressively aware of the repeated event. By design, McQueen creates a physical tactility of the filmic experience through space and affect, by confronting the viewer with the perceived effect of their own physical truth. As a
Slowing down Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) so that it took 24 hours to play, Gordon disturbed the continuum of the film. Through experiential dynamic and his created affect, the almost static images return the medium to the state of a raw material. In addition, Gordon deactivates the linear narrative and in doing so shifts the emphasis to the presence of the moment, the isolation of which restructures the relationship between installation and viewer. Similarly, the aesthetic experience of his other works include states of mind and, it can be proposed, affect through technology, which serve to intensify the space of film object and viewer