Jason Farago 

Stan Douglas’ Circa 1948: ‘It’s not a game, it’s a story’

One of Canada's great artists is back with a project that explores Vancouver's historical hotels, gambling dens and beer halls
  
  

Stan Douglas
Circa 1948, created by Stan Douglas in collaboration with the NFB Digital Studio. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Photograph: /Stan Douglas Photograph: Stan Douglas

“There’s more truth in the lie than in the documentary,” Stan Douglas tells me. We’re standing in a cavernous New York art gallery, gazing up at one of his larger photographs, a hyperreal panoramic tableau of West Indian men playing cricket in a Vancouver park. The title is Cricket Pitch, 1951 – but it wasn’t shot then. It was photographed in 2010, and while it purports to be a traditional vintage print, it actually combines multiple shots with digital technology that makes Photoshop look like amateur hour.

Nothing’s ever simple in Douglas’s images, but that’s the only way he knows how to work. “Because of technology, nobody believes any more that a photograph is real. But that just means that we have to take more responsibility as creators of images. We can’t just say, ‘Oh, this happened to be there when I was there.’ You have to take ownership. It’s always a construction, no matter what.”

Douglas, whose films, videos and photography have given him as strong a claim as anyone to the title of Canada’s greatest artist, is back in New York this week to unveil his latest work, a murder-mystery film noir titled Circa 1948. Instead of appearing at a gallery, Douglas has taken Circa 1948 to the Tribeca Film Festival, where it’s one of the highlights of this year’s massive selection.

It is the artist’s first appearance in a cinematic setting, but what’s even more surprising is that Circa 1948 isn’t really a film at all. It’s an interactive and bafflingly intricate multimedia project, and its images, though disturbingly lifelike, have all been digitally rendered. In New York, festivalgoers can use their bodies to navigate the spaces of postwar Vancouver, and starting this week, anyone with an iOS device can download Circa 1948 for free.

Circa 1948 is set in two Vancouver neighborhoods: a tonier western district populated by veterans back from war, and a seedier eastern part that, says Douglas, was “basically an ethnic slum where the laws of the city had been suspended. There was bootlegging, gambling, prostitution. Even the mayor would go there to party.” The plot of the film – if 'film' is the right word – centers on a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband, and users start to piece the story together by interacting with spectral figures that inhabit Vancouver’s hotels, gambling dens, and beer halls. But you’ll never make it to the end, nor will you ever get the whole story.

“It’s not a game,” Douglas insists. “It’s a narrative. There’s no task: you’re not told to find this, kill that. There’s no beginning, middle or end – you’re sort of always in the middle. But that’s always the best part of a novel, say: not the beginning or the end. In the middle you know what’s going on.”

The app and the Tribeca Film Festival installation follow on the heels of a large photo series entitled Midcentury Studio, which comprised images "from" the postwar period that were actually made today. Some of them were rigorously composed (that cricket photograph, for example), while others indulge the same noir aesthetic as Circa 1948: crime bosses, hardboiled detectives, men in fedoras shooting dice in an alley.

Why noir? “It has its basis in the trauma of war,” Douglas says. “People during wartime, both at home and abroad, will do things that they’re not proud of in order to survive in a time of scarcity and rationing. While they’ve been away, having killed people or seen people die around them, that’s quite dramatic. So tough guys and femmes fatales sort of come from this condition."

“We know what wartime is like. We know what the 50s are like – the nuclear family, the sudden call to order and morality. But we don’t really understand the interim period, from 1945 to 1950. How did society go from one to the other? And what decisions were made to change society? I was interested in that liminal period, as I always am in my work.”

Douglas was born and raised in Vancouver, the city of glass on the western edge of Canada that, for three decades now, has been a hothouse of photography and video with a conceptual edge. (It’s also the de facto backlot of Hollywood, where discount-hunting American producers can shoot on the cheap.) He burst onto the international art scene in the early 1990s with technically complicated film installations: using multiple projectors on one screen, say, or projecting a film and its negative on top of each other.

As digital media became more sophisticated, he started making videos that used a computer to edit and recombine footage into bogglingly complex fragmentary narratives. In Journey Into Fear (2001), a thriller set on a container ship, the audio and video tracks get shuffled around at random so that the total running time comes to 157 hours. Don’t worry if you need a bathroom break. “Seeing everything isn’t really the point,” Douglas stipulates. “The point is getting to the place where you understand the logic, the atmosphere of the piece.”

Like many black artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Douglas used his art to examine race and discrimination, not only that faced by African Canadians but by the country’s native population. But he always did so obliquely, and racial questions were always freighted with psychological and existential overtones – as in I’m Not Gary (1991), a 30-second masterpiece that’s something of a cult classic among Canadian arts hipsters. In a drab Vancouver suburb, the sort of non-space that makes the city such a perfect location for Hollywood’s B-movies, two men cross each other’s path in a strip mall parking lot. “Hi, Gary,” the white man says. “How ya doin’?” To which the black man responds – exasperatedly, but with just the tiniest doubt in his voice – “I’m not Gary.” Cut.

Stan Douglas, I'm Not Gary. 1991.

This newest work continues Douglas’s practice of fracturing narratives and looking at history, race, and psychology through a kaleidoscopic lens. (Hogan’s Alley, the rundown neighborhood that app users and festivalgoers explore, was where black musicians went to party after playing in the west end nightclubs that wouldn’t have them at customers.) Yet despite its appearance in the Tribeca Film Festival, Circa 1948 isn’t exactly a film. It’s rendered rather than photographed, though simulation technologies have got so good you can hardly tell. And, at the core, getting the newest app to do the niftiest tricks isn’t really Stan Douglas’s goal.

Technology is just a means to tell stories, and the near-infinite stories that can arise from an iOS app aren’t so far from the silver screen. “It’s an individual thing, just like film,” he explains. “Film doesn’t work as a bunch of still frames. It happens in the gap between frames, and in our imagination of how we’re moving forward in time, moving somewhere in space, or seeing from someone else’s point of view. It’s not in the shots; it’s in the space in between, and it’s all in your head."

“So in a way, by seeing these fragments of reality you get a sense of the whole even though you see it in pieces. It’s a very human way of being there, I think. We don’t look at reality as a whole gestalt – we see a reality in fragments. And it’s only through that that we can begin the process of empathizing with what they went through then, and begin to understand what we’re going through now.”

 

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