Deadpan

1996 was the first year that a video artist, Douglas Gordon, won the Turner Prize. One of his best known works, Deadpan is a restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt in which a house collapses around McQueen who is left unscathed because he is where there is a window.

The use of extreme and unexpected camera angles is a trademark of McQueen's films. The idea of putting the camera in an unfamiliar position is simply to do with film language . Cinema is a narrative form and by putting the camera at a different angle, we are questioning that narrative as well as the way we are looking at things. It is also a very physical piece which makes you aware of your own presence in comparison to the legs on the video.