The Plane of Time
From tomorrow's NY Times Book Review, Geoff Dyer's review of DeLillo's new novel Point Omega is now online—
"The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon’s film project '24 Hour Psycho' (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of 'the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets,' 'Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.' Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it’s the deeper implications of the piece— what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time— that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the 'radically altered plane of time': 'The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.'
This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix 'conceptual.'"
Related material:
Steering a Space-Plane
(February 2, 2003)
Holly Day
(February 3, 2010)
Attitude Adjustment
(February 3, 2010)
Cover illustration by Stephen Savage,
NY Times Book Review,
Feb. 2 (Candlemas), 2003
“We live the time that a match flickers.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson, Aes Triplex