ALL IT TAKES IS BALLS

Piracy - so we’re told - is damaging the film business by robbing the majors and funding terrorism, prostitution and drug racketeering. So how come arty gagmeister Douglas Gordon – he of the suffix ‘Turner Prize winner’- can get away with hi-jacking Hitchcock’s Psycho, playing it at two frames a second, call it art, yet never get arrested?

I’m definitely in the wrong game. Like many a filmmaker-in-waiting I could do a lot worse than rebrand myself as an artist and go around calling my short movies 'time-based conceptual works'. Maybe that way not only could I tap into the Arts Council but I could also break into film festivals, just as the bold Douglas is currently doing with his Zidane flick by screening at the EIFF.

Being too skint to make it to Cannes this year, I didn’t get the chance to see what one reviewer called ‘the best film playing in Cannes’. Well, it's easy when you know how - in Douglas' case he must have worked out the profit margin to be had if you take the world's most famous football player and flatter him by saying you're making a video artwork based on a tenuous notion of the working man's experience. Then add a posse of up-themselves but down-with-the-lads art hacks to write a thesis or two about the balletic qualities and poetry of Zidane taking a corner, say - et voilà, you've got a hit on your hands.

What I’d like to know is this – how do you go about raising the cashola to shoot on 17 HD cameras (and why 17? Couldn't they manage on 6?) hire famous camerawhizz Darius Khondji and persuade Zidane and his people to get on board? And get into Cannes?

And while we all know the mark-up on DVDs is a total rip-off, the Royal Scottish Academy seems to think it’s got itself a bargain by forking out 70 grand of Lottery spoils for a copy of Zidane. I doubt there’s a filmmaker in the UK who can flog their movie at that price and (presumably) keep the rights, allowing them to cash in when the next sucker wants to buy a copy.

Not only that, with time-based art – otherwise known as dodgy videos, the artist gets bespoke screening facilities. Galleries are known to kit out special rooms to show this guff. Having seen a clip of Zidane on Reporting Scotland – half of it out of focus and barely edited – it occurs to me you can get pretty much the same effect using a BBC OB unit with hangovers at Parkhead on any given Saturday.

They say you can fool some of the people all of the time, an equation our Dougie obviously worked out ages ago. Good for him, I say. Football might be the beautiful game, but art’s the more lucrative one.