Van Sant ’ s Hitchcock remake appeared five years after the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon had created a gallery installation called 24 Hour Psycho , in which the film is played out at two frames per second , requiring a full day to watch the whole thing , now robbed of any narrative coherence or significance . These examples may seem rather distant from music and it is music that you are holding in your hand and that has brought you here , so , again , what is the relevance ? One might say that both Van Sant ’ s and Gordon ’ s work are musical variations on a given theme , the Scotsman ’ s cast in the kind of “ durational ” performance form that was becoming fashionable at the time .
There is always an analogy to be found with music , whichever one of the creative arts is discussed , but now , perhaps , is the moment to refocus on it more precisely . Miles Davis ’ Kind of Blue was made at exactly the moment Robert Bloch ’ s horror-thriller Psycho was published , and when Hitchcock ’ s movie version came out the following year , Kind of Blue was already established as one of the landmark jazz albums of all time , appearing high on everyone ’ s best-of lists , much as Psycho was to become a paradigm , albeit often misunderstood and misrepresented , of cinematography . The two artefacts don ’ t seem at first glance to reflect the same Zeitgeist at all . Hitchcock ’ s film came out of a world of rigid professional hierarchies , the pursuit of material success above all , drab afternoon affairs , an unknown and unknowable America beyond the city limits ; Miles ’ music was , or appeared to be , all insouciant style , unhurriedly hedonistic , coming out of an America more concerned with a leisure ethic than with labour . And yet , these are actually only superficial differences . There are deep-level connections that set film and album within a single cultural moment .
When one considers that much of the film ’ s impact comes from Bernard Herrmann ’ s music for Psycho , there are even more direct points of
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