Stan Douglas

Der Sandmann investigates the intersection of history and memory as witnessed against the backdrop of post–Cold War Germany.

For Suspiria, Stan Douglas brings together the visual style of Dario Argento's 1977 horror movie of the same title; the properties of the now obsolete Technicolor process; the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm and a soundtrack featuring John Medeski and Scott Harding (of the celebrated Jazz ensemble Medeski, Martin and Wood). Stan Douglas's Suspiria takes as its location the Herkules Oktagon, Kassel's most famous historical landmark: a monumental octagonal structure built in the late 17th century, atop Wilhelmshöhe overlooking the city of Kassel.

Birth of a Nation reinterprets D.W. Griffith's notorious 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a technically groundbreaking but deeply racist work that glorifies white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan. Stan Douglas focuses on one infamous narrative strand from Griffith’s film involving the character Gus—a Black man played in blackface—who is falsely depicted as a threat to a white woman, Flora. In the original, this leads to her death and Gus's lynching by the Klan.

During 1864 in the Cariboo Mountains, hostility mounts between the Tsilhqot’in tribe and encroaching settlers seeking gold on the Chilcotin Plateau. Klatsassin leads an insurgency and evades capture. However, he is eventually lured with the gift of tobacco, take prisoner, tried for murder, and hanged.

In a meticulous reconstruction of a famous New York studio session, musicians jam for hours non-stop. Inspired by Godard’s film portrait of The Rolling Stones recording their hit single Sympathy for the Devil, Stan Douglas evokes a 1973 Miles Davis recording session.

A two-channel video in which the film's protagonists, Donny and Bob, talk, argue and fight in an endless loop that plays out over and over in an ever-shifting and altering array of combinations. The total number of possible combinations is said to total 20,000 hours of play - over two years.

Simple in its conceit, the installation consists of a six-minute audiovisual loop comprised of three archival film segments shot by the Edison Film Company between 1889 and 1901, and six passages from the opening pages (or overture) to Marcel Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu, as read by Vancouver writer Gerald Creede.

Douglas’s Monodramas, ten 30- to 60-second videos conceived as interventions into commercial television, interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These micronarratives mimic television’s editing techniques, but as kernels of a story they refuse to cohere. They are tales of dysfunction and dislocation, misanthropy and misunderstanding: a car and a school bus nearly collide at an intersection, only to drive away; a pedestrian greets an Afro-Canadian man he encounters on the street but is told in response, “I’m not Gary.” When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold, their responses evincing how the media can refocus attention from content to consumption.