Much has been written about the "cinema effect" in contemporary
art. One symptom of this effect was the recent ascendancy of the
remake as genre and strategy. Remakes of movies—classic, cult or
obscure—have taken on the form of the video installation to invade
museums for well over ten years. The works of Stan Douglas, Pierre
Huyghe, and Douglas Gordon provide the most sophisticated examples of this practice. At their best, remakes rework films to extract
structures and arrangements that speak to the film’s historical
moment as well as to the context of the remake. Many other works
are much less fortunate.
This "cinema effect" and the remake have been explored from two
different disciplinary contexts—film history/criticism and art history/criticism. Interdisciplinarity has yet to contribute to this subject.
For most film historians, the museum has now become the last
refuge of independent filmmakers since the cinema’s new economy
has excluded them from its traditional spaces. The museum is, in a
way, the intensive care unit of experimental film. The shortcoming of
this axis of analysis is that critics fail to tackle the spatialization that
the installation operates. In contrast to the cinema experience, viewers are mobilized in moving image installations. They walk in on the
work, and leave at various times. They stay for varied durations, and
position themselves in relation to the projection surface and the moving image in infinite ways. Finally, the prism of film criticism falls
short of any analysis of the relation between onscreen space and the
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space of the gallery. It lacks a spatial vocabulary that links film technique with performance and installation practices.
In turn, most art historians lack the requisite knowledge of film
history—and of the disciplines with which the cinema has always
sustained an intimate dialogue, namely literature and theatre—to
discern what is at stake in many video installations. They consider
moving installations from the installation side, scrutinizing the
architectural, sculptural, and performative aspects of the work while
missing their connections with the footage’s syntax. What appears
new and exciting to the visual art critic is often clichéd for the historians of the cinema and theatre theorists. This explains much of the
unfortunate work we see in many exhibitions today—spectacular or
seemingly rigorous for some, yet terribly cliché for others. As artists
are exploring an ever expanding field of performance practices such
as dance, opera, and puppetry, the challenges presented by moving
image installations are multiplying.
Failures of the critical apparatus aside, moving image installations
nonetheless remain today’s most probing works. Their unique contribution is the pressure that they concomitantly exert on the histories,
theories, media, and institutions of art, film and cinema—and, in
some cases, on popular culture. These installations reactivate debates
that, buried deep within modernisms, their avant-gardes, and histories, have been played out through the policing of the borders of the
institution of fine arts and the cinema, the containment of film,
STAN DOUGLAS’
INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES:
ADAPTING SYNCHRONY
TEXT / SYLVIE FORTIN
sound, painting, and sculpture as media, and the concealment of
their barters and intersections. Promiscuity is the operational logic of
moving image installations. They map out the legacy of this intimacy
between art and the cinema. They also track down the actuality of
their exchange, and ultimately reveal sustained dialogues that
require us to reassert promiscuity’s yield and revisit our institutions,
theories, and histories. These installations thus destabilize the
boundaries that have foreclosed a more complex understanding of
avant-garde practices.
Stan Douglas’ most recent body of work, Inconsolable Memories,
comprises a screenplay, photographs, and a synchronized black and
white 16mm film installation. The photographs were produced over
the course of the two years when Douglas was researching and developing this project. In addition to their multifarious relations to the
film installation, the photographs are themselves engaged with what
now amounts to something like a photographic genre—Cuba photographed. These images are thus in a critical dialogue with the dominant ways of representing Cuba today, be it by Cuban photographers
or foreigners. Douglas’ Cuba images pressure the norms that guide
Cuban photographers’ representations of their environment as well
as the well-rehearsed exoticism that dictates what foreigners, including photographers, have come to see in Cuba. Devoid of human presence, Douglas’ images nonetheless reveal environments shaped by
traces of human action and layers of intervention. They are compendia of the political and economic regimes that have shaped Cuba—
colonial/national, communist/international, and capitalist/global.
The photograph Spanish Bastion/Private House, Mariel is a perfect
example of this crystallization. It features a seventeenth century
Spanish bastion that, provided as temporary shelter to a family in the
1980s, is still their residence. It is flanked by a Communist-era apartment building on the left, and opens onto a beach. A bicycle leans outside a courtyard on the right. Mariel is one of Cuba’s shores closest to
Florida. It is the location from which over 125,000 people fled for the
United States in 1980. The photograph thus condenses references to
multiple chapters of Cuba’s complex political/economic histories.
Likewise, a landmark of pre-revolutionary Cuba, the Havana Hilton,
lost its multinational name, to take on the name of freedom after the
revolution—Habana Libre. Besides its focus on the building’s name
change, Douglas’ historicization relies here on subtleties of photographic language rather than on the traces of history on the built
environment. The camera angle, the cropping of the building, and the
all too insistent vultures distance this photograph from aggrandizing
modernist architecture photography and its cousin, the document of
the socialist project’s modernizing success. In this image, the flight of
vultures occupies as much of the image as the hotel itself, whose
upper stories diagonally float into the image. The roof-bound antennae are further dwarfed into pathetic needles. Finally, the Havana
Hilton/Habana Libre name change reveals itself to be a nomenclatural synchronization with the regime of the day—a synchronization
that is also at play in Douglas’ film installation.
Inconsolable Memories is a synchronized film installation—two
16 mm films are projected simultaneously onto a single screen.
It is not a remake as such, but rather an adaptation of Tomás
Guttièrrez Alea´s 1968 film, Memorias del subdesarrollo [Memories of
Inside front cover: production image from Inconsolable Memories, two synchronized asymmetrical film loop projections: 16mm black and white film, sound, 15 permutations with a common period of 5:38 minutes, edition of 4 (courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York) / above left to right: Stan Douglas, Spanish Bastion /
Private Home, Mariel, 2004, laser-jet prints mounted on 1/4 inch honeycomb aluminum, image dimensions: 31 x 38 3/4 inches, overall dimension: 48 x 54 3/4 inches
(courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York) / Stan Douglas, Havana Hilton / Habana Libre, Vedado, 2004, laser-jet prints mounted on 1/4 inch honeycomb aluminum, image dimensions: 31 x 38 3/4 inches, overall dimension: 48 x 54 3/4 inches (courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York)
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Underdevelopment]. Douglas defines the relationship of his project
to Alea’s film by writing that "aspects of this project were derived
from" it.1 Alea’s film was itself an adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes’
1965 namesake novel. To make matters even more complex, Douglas’
title invokes the title chosen for Desnoes’ novel by its American
publisher in 1967.2 This title was, in turn, taken from Alain Resnais’
film Hiroshima, Mon Amour. In the mid-1960s, the fight against
imperialism became an international project. Relations between
Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and the fight for civil rights in the USA—
to name only a few sites of struggle—were both articulated and
disseminated.
Memorias del subdesarrollo was set in 1962. This is revealed by references to Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, television
broadcasts of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Mariel Boatlift and the
Reagan/Bush Florida campaign locate Inconsolable Memories in
1980. "Was there a revolution no one told me about?" Sergio asks himself repeatedly in Inconsolable Memories. Douglas’ adaptation layers
two markers of Cuban revolutionary history, ghosting one in the
other, and yielding insights into questions of race, gender, and
urban/rural relations. 1962 and 1980 are thus dialectically juxtaposed. Sergio is no longer a white bourgeois landowner; he is now a
black architect. His wife, Laura, is now the wealthy one, who leaves
him her family’s Vedado apartment after she emigrates to Miami.
Elena, the young uneducated woman with whom Sergio has an
affair in Alea’s film, is recast as a mulatto analyst and translator of
American broadcast media who is so successful that she has been
given Sergio’s comfortable apartment when he is imprisoned.
Alea’s cult film, a low budget production, comprises still images,
titles, graphics, news clippings and footage, hidden camera footage,
and footage shot specifically for the film. It fluently combines documentary and fiction, script and improvisation. In addition, it makes
extensive use of flashback and repetition. Many of these features are
adopted and adapted by Douglas, who uses black and white film for
a number of effects. First, the black and white format allows him to
stay closer to Alea’s film vocabulary. In Douglas’ installation, black
and white is also a medium of historicization. In addition, it is a
reflection of economic reality. Here, black and white does not so
much signify a specific period or nostalgia, but points to the prolonged use of black and white stock in Cuban film production. A
Cuban filmmaker may well have used it in 1980. Ultimately, here, the
use of black and white induces a suspended time, a two-way traffic
between 1962 and 1980. This suspension, in turn, further opens the
work to our interpretation, our traffic with it in 2006.
One of the two film loops is comprised of thirty segments; its
duration is 28:15 minutes. The other comprises eighteen segments,
and lasts 15:57 minutes. The work is punctuated by combinatory
titles. The longer loops features five sequences that combine an
image and an adjective—A FAMILIAR, A TROPICAL, A FORGOTTEN,
AN ENDLESS, ANOTHER. The shorter loop features three nominal
sequences on blank backgrounds—SITUATION, ADVENTURE and
PROBLEM. Adjectives—modifiers—are therefore the textual elements bound with specific images. Nouns—names—are the free
radicals that attach themselves to scenes and sequences, temporarily
defining them. The work features fifteen different configurations,
all black and white images are film stills from Inconsolable Memories, two synchronized asymmetrical film loop projections: 16mm black and white film, sound, 15 permutations with a common period of 5:38 minutes, edition of 4 (courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York)
which one can experience in 84:45 minutes. The projections briefly
fade to black between sequences—a further suspension, and a form
of temporal punctuation. While images are never overlaid, musical
and narrative sequences are synchronized so as to inflect a number
of scenes successively. The reconfiguration that relentlessly informs
this installation transcends questions of montage. While scenes follow each other in different ways to transform the story, and to prevent it from crystallizing, much more is at play.
Three spoken narrative fragments successively attach and free
themselves from a number of visual scenes. Significantly, these itinerant voice-overs are precisely those that Douglas borrowed more
closely from Alea’s film. These are the tape-recorder incident, a reflection on the devouring work of language, and a contemplation of the
traumatic social aftermaths of colonialism. The tape-recorder incident—a fight between Sergio and his wife—significantly appears
twice in Alea’s film (once as a flashback). In Douglas’ installation the
footage of Sergio starting and stopping the recording is silent
footage. It can thus be incessantly inflected by the audio/narrative
with which it temporarily coincides—the altercation with Laura that
follows Sergio’s recording of her indictment of revolutionary Cuba
and declaration of her decision to leave; two different version of Los
Van Van’s Llegue Llegue; a reflection on the politics of language; and
the realization that everyone Sergio knows is gone. These itinerant
audio sequences, in turn, attach themselves to other images: Llegue
Llegue accompanies Sergio’s escape, and so on. Each time a new combination occurs, it acts retrospectively and prospectively. It destabilizes and recontextualizes its own prior occurrence, and prepares us
for its next permutation.
As these are predominantly voice-over reflections of the protagonist Sergio, it is as if Alea’s film were running in Sergio’s head as he
endlessly recites these monologues, attaching them to various
scenes. We are way past the flashback or the interior reflection. We
are much closer to a compulsive stuttering, to a divorce from reality
where memories are not so much remembered as recited. As the projections link themselves in constantly changing configurations, certainty is further undermined by itinerant narratives.
If Douglas’ installation features fifteen intertitles, one of them—A
TROPICAL ADVENTURE—is a direct citation from Alea’s film where it
precedes Sergio’s and Elena’s guided tour of Ernest Hemingway’s
Cuban residence. This clearly exemplifies Douglas’ notion of the
remake. A remake is a moving image installation that enlists the
multiple potentials of its apparatus to deconstruct its source in order
to tease out structural, thematic, narrative, visual, and political principles and arrangements, which are then redeployed. Such rigorous
and creative analysis—an operation that enlists condensation,
extraction, and exportation—reworks the source material as it works
out new arrangements, fresh remediations.
Other itinerant narratives include a reflection on the trauma of the
colonial legacy:
In an underdeveloped country there is no continuity,
everything is forgotten. We waste our talents adapting to
every situation. Even those assholes in Miami, worms like
Pablo, blindly obey new masters.
It’s colonial mentality: drop projects half finished, fail to
think things through to their conclusion, But that’s what
civilization is: knowing how to relate things and not forgetting anything…that’s why civilization is impossible
here. We live too much in the present.3
As these words travel in and out of scenes, they carry the traces of
their prior positions, which they layer over each new scene. Strange
and unstable narrative hybrids are thus produced. But the voice-over
is not untainted either. It does not have the godlike ability to impregnate images without being altered by the interaction. The video
installation remediates the voice-over in the sense that it, quite literally, makes it another medium. As an itinerant voice-over successively attaches itself to images in the space of the installation, it
becomes more than the reflection of an onscreen protagonist of the
type one meets in films. The space of the installation, and the art
institution, both accent the utterance. This is the transversal action of
the itinerant voice-over. It operates simultaneously with the voiceover’s inflection and re-signification of the images—or, vertical
action of the itinerant sound. In addition, the voice-over comes to
carry with it the trace of its various vertical promiscuities, the
images’ modulation of the voice-over, which it ghosts into each
encounter. This is its horizontal action—the traces of associations
inside and outside Douglas’ work.
When it was released in 1968, Memories of Underdevelopment
posed urgent aesthetic and political questions. Stan Douglas’ remediation of the film into a synchronized film installation imbricates
historical events from 1962 and 1980 into an open-ended work that
calls upon contemporary viewers to fill in the gaps.
NOTES
1. Stan Douglas, "Inconsolable Memories: A Screenplay by Stan Douglas," in
Cindy Richmond and Scott Watson, eds., Inconsolable Memories, Omaha
and Vancouver: Joslyn Art Museum and The Morris and Helen Belkin Art
Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 93.
2. Edmundo Desnoes, Memorias del subdesarrollo, La Habana: Ediciones
Uniòn, 1965. The title of the novel was changed to Inconsolable Memories
for its American translation, which was published in by the New
American Library in 1967.
3. Douglas, 113.
Sylvie Fortin is Editor-in-Chief of ART PAPERS.
Stan Douglas’ Inconsolable Memories was on view at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha [March 21—May 8, 2005], at the Venice Biennale,
and at The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver [January 13—March 12, 2006]. It travels to
the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto [April 19—June 25, 2006].
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