We interviewed Stan Douglas in 1998.

Stan Douglas

Canadian Stan Douglas produces very considered works in video, frequently combined with stage sets, exploring ideas about memory and time – often interwoven with references to music and literature.

Interview

Through your use of film, video and photography, you create remarkably strong and poetic images. Do you have a preference for a particular art form or are you happier working in mixed media?

In theory, I try to find a medium appropriate to an idea rather than the other way around. But, obviously, I have a bias towards the camera – in video, photography and film – and I try to use qualities peculiar to those media in addressing a subject. Video is a good medium for recording motion and film for spatial things – and I usually work with local usages and historical idioms of broadcasting or screen practice.

In 1994/1995 you worked in Berlin as a guest of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. What did you miss about Canada and what influence did the time you spent in Germany have on you?

The things I missed were those one takes for granted -like the humour which is tacitly understood by people who share a culture but quite opaque to an outsider. But there are qualities of your home that small doses of alienation make more apparent, like when I briefly came back to Vancouver from Berlin I was for the first time able to hear the Vancouver accent …

While in Berlin I made a piece called Der Sandmann which tried to address both my status as an outsider and certain conditions peculiar to Berlin. It was produced in a small Ufa studio in Potsdam/Babelsberg – and it was the last film to be produced there before the land was appropriated for commercial development. What interested me was the palimpsest of regimes of reality one finds in Potsdam: Imperial buildings being restored, DDR buildings being destroyed, and western capital trying to turn nearby Wansee into a luxury resort town again.

Films produced at this studio, and others in the larger Babelsberg Filmstadt, were often preoccupied with the notion of the double or Doppelgänger. In addition to Hoffman’s Sandman, one ‘Gothic’ tale that particularly interested me was Der Student von Prag, which was produced in 1913, re-made in 1926 and once more in 1936 – during very different moments of Germany’s history. The narrative motif – a man sells his mirror image to a magician, the latter compels the image to do evil deeds, then the man, attempting to kill his image, kills himself – apparently has something important to do with the German imagination. The basic technical procedure which made the original and subsequent films possible – shooting one half of the screen with an actor, rolling back the camera and shooting the other half of the screen with the same actor so he seems to occupy the same space with his double – is more or less the same one, spatialized with two projectors, in Der Sandmann.

Another technique which you use to great effect is that of telling the same story through different voices but simultaneously.

Two such pieces are illustrated here. In Evening, three video screens present news broadcasts from three fictitious TV stations on January 1st, 1969 and January 1st, 1970. The three presenters talk in unison, in a sort of counterpoint, but each station takes a different approach to the news – from the ingratiating ‘Happy Talk News’ format to paternalistic news reading. In Nutka, two different sequences of the same sea-coast run simultaneously, respectively occupying even and odd raster lines of the video image, while the voices of an English captain and a Spanish commander recite their perspectives on a botched colonial incident in the late 18th century.

References to music and literature – the jazz musicians in ‘Hors-champs’, Schönberg in ‘Ruskin’, Proust in ‘Overture’, and Samuel Beckett about whom you have also written, add an essential dimension to your work. Perhaps you could say a little about how these various media interact.

Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin BC is a narrative film accompanied by a computer-controlled player piano, mimicking the live performances that would typically accompany films in the silent era. In Ruskin, however, the music is only present under the cloud of a lie which drives the action in the middle of the story. There is a silent prologue, and the music ends when the lie is found out.

The work looks at a decrepit moment of British colonialism in Canada, on the eve of the Great Depression, and is set in a place called ‘Ruskin’, which had been the site of a utopian commune in the 1890s that only survived for a couple of years. The montage in the middle section of the film follows the narrative trajectory of its soundtrack – Schönberg’s 1929 Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene – which is broken into three thematic segments: Pursuit, Fear and Catastrophe. In my story a Japanese man is presented with a police officer’s hypothesis about the disappearance of his room mate. He goes through his own investigation, obstructed by the police force. The police give up their investigation. The room mate is able to find information to discredit the police but, because of his social status, can’t do anything about it.

When I was working on Ruskin I did a lot of research on silent and early talking films. I was amazed by the effect that talk and scripting had on cinematic production. Silent films could have a very high narrative density compared with talkies because conventions of cinematic psychology were not expected by producers or audiences.

Overture is a film loop installation composed of material shot by the Edison Film Company between 1899 and 1901. The images are of a train’s journey through the Rocky Mountains: coming out of a tunnel, going down a section of track into another tunnel, in three different settings, then looping. There is also a voice-over derived from the ‘overture’, or introduction, to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – in which he describes the experience of falling asleep, drifting in and out of consciousness, as he lays out the themes which will preoccupy the remainder of the book. This was my own ‘overture’ because I knew that its primary subjects would preoccupy my work for the next few years – in as much as I’ve adopted the notions of Voluntary and Involuntary Memory, as the relationship of human time to mechanical time (or mechanical reproduction) and, of course, the notion of Habit which, when broken, becomes the Proustian alienation effect.

Hors-champs is a two-sided video projection on a suspended screen, presenting the performance of a ‘Free Jazz’ composition from the 1960s, Albert Ayler’s Spirits Rejoice. On one side of the screen there’s the ‘official’ version, shot in the style of early 1960s French television programmes, and on the back there’s a simultaneous montage of out-takes. ‘Hors-champs’ literally means ‘out of field’ and refers to the photographic effect whereby, if you see only a hand within a frame, you know a body is connected to it. The work indicates a few varieties of this condition, as in the exile of black musicians living in France during the 1960s, or in the exile of the real from reproduction. But its hopefully not as gloomy as all that. At some moment, polyphonic music in general, and ensemble pieces in particular, always say ‘we’ – and, therefore, can always suggest possibilities, unimagined ways in which individuals can collectively inhabit time.