Art - Ned Denny on the sacred magic of an artist who operates in the shadows of other people's films

''On the screen, actresses are beautiful when frightened." This unassuming little sentence, plucked from the strange and wonderful autobiography that Douglas Gordon has published to coincide with his one-man show at the Hayward Gallery, gets you closer to 24 Hour Psycho (1993) than any amount of half-baked talk about authorship and authenticity. The piece is Gordon's most notorious, a deceleration of the Hitchcock classic so that it occupies not the snappy time-frame of fiction but the infinitely slower one of an actual day. Look at its tortuous, jerky, frame-by-frame progression and it seems that the actors are puppets, no longer free agents but the passive objects of some guiding force. The fact that we know where all this is heading only increases the sense of a malevolent, inescapable fate. More important, though, and more simply, the extreme slowness of 24 Hour Psycho makes you realise that Hitchcock's film is first and foremost a portrait of a woman. The camera has not only recorded Janet Leigh's dark eyes and delicate features but also her every falter and every blink, every fugitive glance. Leisurely enough for us to drink all this in, Gordon's version becomes an image of life lived at a properly respectful pace, a life in which every moment is accorded its proper weight. So who really cares if the shower scene only swings round once a day, when each frame shows the same fearful beauty and the same beautiful fear?

All of the work in which Gordon uses other people's films does something similar to this, which is to suppress their narrative element, the fact that we are being told a story in broadly realistic terms, in favour of their status as allegory or myth or realm. I think he'd be the first to admit that he operates, as it were, in the shadows of cinematic culture, not snootily appropriating it for "higher ends" but trying to restore something of its own sacred magic. Another example of this is Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake), 1997, in which Gordon projects Henry King's The Song of Bernadette (1943) and William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) on to either side of a single screen. Both are films about hauntings, but here they haunt each other, the monochrome pieties of the Lourdes peasants and the seamy colour of the Friedkin film seeming to pass through each other like phantom worlds. Watch it for a while: you'll see that the simultaneous screening progresses just like life, with long stretches of conflict, boredom or mere dissociation punctuated by strange excitements (the ghost-pale Holy Virgin who materialises in a Friedkin crowd scene, the electric-blue subway train that roars through a 19th-century wood).

Between Darkness and Light also raises the spectre of Gordon's principal obsession, namely the Doppelganger, the wraith, the evil-doing shadow. The Hayward show is filled with doublings of various sorts, from the portrait of Gordon with a repellent, bumpkin-faced twin, Monster, 1996-97, to the piece that has him trying to kiss a "truth drug" on to the lips of his reflection, Self Portrait (Kissing with Scopolamine), 1994, to the exhibition title itself ("what have I done", with its suggestions of a mortified, post-frenzy Jekyll). The divided self also crops up in the series of small-screen video works that have one of the artist's hands being throttled, caressed or shafted by the other; and in the early piece, part of the installation Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now . . . (2002), that loops that famous scene from Taxi Driver. "You talkin' to me?" De Niro spits, squaring up to the mirror. "You talkin' to me? Who the fuck are you talkin' to?" Maybe Travis has the right idea - the only way of treating that detached, ironic, self-regarding other is to whip out your gun.

If these film-based works are Gordon's most memorable, there is a simple reason for it, namely that the raw material is so rich and so allusive. Above and beyond any meanings that, say, 24 Hour Psycho may or may not have, the source film exists as a complex, moving, fully articulated world. It's a kind of technological Eden, bright and unenterable. The counterpart to this is Something between my mouth and your ear (1994), a darkened room lit only by a pair of long, blue, screen-shaped lightboxes on the far wall. The music playing is all stuff that charted while Gordon was in utero, which must make this the womb, which must make that sliver of radiant azure the vast outside world. Despite the blare of The Byrds and The Who, it's the most sober work in the show. All we really have, it says, are songs, brief shelter and the empty blueness of heaven.

"Douglas Gordon: what have I done" is at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1 (020 7960 4242) until 5 January 2003

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