The Secret Agent

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.

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.

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

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.

A video filmed "live" by STAN DOUGLAS and one other camera man, records the performance of four American musicians playing a Free Jazz composition. In the gallery installation two projections are simultaneously presented on the front and back of a large scale suspended screen. While one side shows the edited version of this two-camera production, the other side presents a simultaneous counter-narrative of all that has been edited out.

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.

IDSN is a fictionalized account of two musical collectives, one in London featuring rappers, TrueMendous and Lady Sanity, and the other in Cairo with rappers Raptor and Joker, who are making music collaboratively using ISDN technology, communicating across phone lines from their respective makeshift studios.

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.

Produced between 1987 and 1988, the Television Spots are exactly what they claim to be: these twelve, short video sequences were originally planned as inserts within the regular advertisements on Canada’s private television network.

Nu•tka• utilizes image bifurcation to explore the history of colonialization on Vancouver Island, where English and Spanish fleets battled over trade routes in the 18th century. Films of the landscape—the only imagery shown—are superimposed on one screen so that the footage appears doubled. This formal effect is echoed by the soundtrack, which includes excerpts from the sea captains’ diaries, which become increasingly paranoid and irrational. At key moments in the narrative all visual and verbal elements meld together in exquisite clarity.

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.

A middle-aged black man is falsely hailed by a passerby: “Hi, Gary!” He stops and turns. “How’s it going?” The camera takes in another careful, evenly lit shot of the man as he frowns and delivers his line with actorly gravitas: “I’m not Gary.”