A door bursts open, a man hurtles across the screen, overturning a table in pursuit of some vanishing figure. A door bursts open, and a woman slams it hard against whoever is chasing behind her. A door opens more slowly, a face peering anxiously round it, eyes widening with astonishment. Just as you are about to see who or what they saw, the door closes with a click. A key turns sharply in the lock.
Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay’s Doors is all revelation and drama. For almost an hour, the viewer sits spellbound in a darkened cinema specially created for the film’s UK premiere at White Cube, watching a nonstop onslaught of entrances and exits. Clip after clip, selected from hundreds of movies, appears on the big screen in an extraordinary feat of choreography and collage. Somehow, it seems as if each is directly connected to the next, no matter that they shift between monochrome and colour, and all the way from silent films to French New Wave and Hollywood blockbuster.
