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Much has been written about the "cinema effect" in contemporaryart. One symptom of this effect was the recent ascendancy of theremake as genre and strategy. Remakes of movies—classic, cult orobscure—have taken on the form of the video installation to invademuseums for well over ten years. The works of Stan Douglas, PierreHuyghe, and Douglas Gordon provide the most sophisticated exam-ples of this practice. At their best, remakes rework films to extractstructures and arrangements that speak to the film’s historicalmoment as well as to the context of the remake. Many other worksare much less fortunate.

This "cinema effect" and the remake have been explored from twodifferent disciplinary contexts—film history/criticism and art his-tory/criticism. Interdisciplinarity has yet to contribute to this subject.For most film historians, the museum has now become the lastrefuge of independent filmmakers since the cinema’s new economyhas excluded them from its traditional spaces. The museum is, in away, the intensive care unit of experimental film. The shortcoming ofthis axis of analysis is that critics fail to tackle the spatialization thatthe installation operates. In contrast to the cinema experience, view-ers are mobilized in moving image installations. They walk in on thework, and leave at various times. They stay for varied durations, andposition themselves in relation to the projection surface and the mov-ing image in infinite ways. Finally, the prism of film criticism fallsshort of any analysis of the relation between onscreen space and the

space of the gallery. It lacks a spatial vocabulary that links film tech-nique with performance and installation practices.

In turn, most art historians lack the requisite knowledge of filmhistory—and of the disciplines with which the cinema has alwayssustained an intimate dialogue, namely literature and theatre—todiscern what is at stake in many video installations. They considermoving installations from the installation side, scrutinizing thearchitectural, sculptural, and performative aspects of the work whilemissing their connections with the footage’s syntax. What appearsnew and exciting to the visual art critic is often clichéd for the histo-rians of the cinema and theatre theorists. This explains much of theunfortunate work we see in many exhibitions today—spectacular orseemingly rigorous for some, yet terribly cliché for others. As artistsare exploring an ever expanding field of performance practices suchas dance, opera, and puppetry, the challenges presented by movingimage installations are multiplying.

Failures of the critical apparatus aside, moving image installationsnonetheless remain today’s most probing works. Their unique contri-bution is the pressure that they concomitantly exert on the histories,theories, media, and institutions of art, film and cinema—and, insome cases, on popular culture. These installations reactivate debatesthat, buried deep within modernisms, their avant-gardes, and histo-ries, have been played out through the policing of the borders of theinstitution of fine arts and the cinema, the containment of film,

STAN DOUGLAS’ INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES:

ADAPTING SYNCHRONY

TEXT / SYLVIE FORTIN

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Inside front cover: production image from Inconsolable Memories, two synchronized asymmetrical film loop projections: 16mm black and white film, sound, 15 permu-tations 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 alu-minum, 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)

sound, painting, and sculpture as media, and the concealment oftheir barters and intersections. Promiscuity is the operational logic ofmoving image installations. They map out the legacy of this intimacybetween art and the cinema. They also track down the actuality oftheir exchange, and ultimately reveal sustained dialogues thatrequire us to reassert promiscuity’s yield and revisit our institutions,theories, and histories. These installations thus destabilize theboundaries that have foreclosed a more complex understanding ofavant-garde practices.

Stan Douglas’ most recent body of work, Inconsolable Memories,comprises a screenplay, photographs, and a synchronized black andwhite 16mm film installation. The photographs were produced overthe course of the two years when Douglas was researching and devel-oping this project. In addition to their multifarious relations to thefilm installation, the photographs are themselves engaged with whatnow amounts to something like a photographic genre—Cuba pho-tographed. These images are thus in a critical dialogue with the dom-inant ways of representing Cuba today, be it by Cuban photographersor foreigners. Douglas’ Cuba images pressure the norms that guideCuban photographers’ representations of their environment as wellas the well-rehearsed exoticism that dictates what foreigners, includ-ing photographers, have come to see in Cuba. Devoid of human pres-ence, Douglas’ images nonetheless reveal environments shaped bytraces of human action and layers of intervention. They are compen-dia 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 centurySpanish bastion that, provided as temporary shelter to a family in the1980s, is still their residence. It is flanked by a Communist-era apart-ment building on the left, and opens onto a beach. A bicycle leans out-side a courtyard on the right. Mariel is one of Cuba’s shores closest toFlorida. It is the location from which over 125,000 people fled for theUnited States in 1980. The photograph thus condenses references tomultiple 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 therevolution—Habana Libre. Besides its focus on the building’s namechange, Douglas’ historicization relies here on subtleties of photo-graphic language rather than on the traces of history on the builtenvironment. The camera angle, the cropping of the building, and theall too insistent vultures distance this photograph from aggrandizingmodernist architecture photography and its cousin, the document ofthe socialist project’s modernizing success. In this image, the flight ofvultures occupies as much of the image as the hotel itself, whoseupper stories diagonally float into the image. The roof-bound anten-nae are further dwarfed into pathetic needles. Finally, the HavanaHilton/Habana Libre name change reveals itself to be a nomenclat-ural synchronization with the regime of the day—a synchronizationthat 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 TomásGuttièrrez Alea´s 1968 film, Memorias del subdesarrollo [Memories of

Underdevelopment]. Douglas defines the relationship of his projectto Alea’s film by writing that "aspects of this project were derivedfrom" 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 againstimperialism became an international project. Relations betweenAlgeria, 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 ref-erences to Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, televisionbroadcasts of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Mariel Boatlift and theReagan/Bush Florida campaign locate Inconsolable Memories in1980. "Was there a revolution no one told me about?" Sergio asks him-self repeatedly in Inconsolable Memories. Douglas’ adaptation layerstwo markers of Cuban revolutionary history, ghosting one in theother, and yielding insights into questions of race, gender, andurban/rural relations. 1962 and 1980 are thus dialectically juxta-posed. Sergio is no longer a white bourgeois landowner; he is now ablack architect. His wife, Laura, is now the wealthy one, who leaveshim her family’s Vedado apartment after she emigrates to Miami.Elena, the young uneducated woman with whom Sergio has anaffair in Alea’s film, is recast as a mulatto analyst and translator ofAmerican broadcast media who is so successful that she has beengiven 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 docu-mentary and fiction, script and improvisation. In addition, it makesextensive use of flashback and repetition. Many of these features areadopted and adapted by Douglas, who uses black and white film fora number of effects. First, the black and white format allows him tostay closer to Alea’s film vocabulary. In Douglas’ installation, blackand white is also a medium of historicization. In addition, it is areflection of economic reality. Here, black and white does not somuch signify a specific period or nostalgia, but points to the pro-longed use of black and white stock in Cuban film production. ACuban filmmaker may well have used it in 1980. Ultimately, here, theuse of black and white induces a suspended time, a two-way trafficbetween 1962 and 1980. This suspension, in turn, further opens thework to our interpretation, our traffic with it in 2006.

One of the two film loops is comprised of thirty segments; itsduration is 28:15 minutes. The other comprises eighteen segments,and lasts 15:57 minutes. The work is punctuated by combinatorytitles. The longer loops features five sequences that combine animage and an adjective—A FAMILIAR, A TROPICAL, A FORGOTTEN,AN ENDLESS, ANOTHER. The shorter loop features three nominalsequences on blank backgrounds—SITUATION, ADVENTURE andPROBLEM. Adjectives—modifiers—are therefore the textual ele-ments bound with specific images. Nouns—names—are the freeradicals that attach themselves to scenes and sequences, temporarilydefining 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 per-mutations with a common period of 5:38 minutes, edition of 4 (courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York)

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which one can experience in 84:45 minutes. The projections brieflyfade to black between sequences—a further suspension, and a formof temporal punctuation. While images are never overlaid, musicaland narrative sequences are synchronized so as to inflect a numberof scenes successively. The reconfiguration that relentlessly informsthis installation transcends questions of montage. While scenes fol-low each other in different ways to transform the story, and to pre-vent it from crystallizing, much more is at play.

Three spoken narrative fragments successively attach and freethemselves from a number of visual scenes. Significantly, these itin-erant voice-overs are precisely those that Douglas borrowed moreclosely from Alea’s film. These are the tape-recorder incident, a reflec-tion on the devouring work of language, and a contemplation of thetraumatic social aftermaths of colonialism. The tape-recorder inci-dent—a fight between Sergio and his wife—significantly appearstwice in Alea’s film (once as a flashback). In Douglas’ installation thefootage of Sergio starting and stopping the recording is silentfootage. It can thus be incessantly inflected by the audio/narrativewith which it temporarily coincides—the altercation with Laura thatfollows Sergio’s recording of her indictment of revolutionary Cubaand declaration of her decision to leave; two different version of LosVan Van’s Llegue Llegue; a reflection on the politics of language; andthe realization that everyone Sergio knows is gone. These itinerantaudio sequences, in turn, attach themselves to other images: LlegueLlegue accompanies Sergio’s escape, and so on. Each time a new com-bination occurs, it acts retrospectively and prospectively. It destabi-lizes and recontextualizes its own prior occurrence, and prepares usfor its next permutation.

As these are predominantly voice-over reflections of the protago-nist Sergio, it is as if Alea’s film were running in Sergio’s head as heendlessly recites these monologues, attaching them to variousscenes. We are way past the flashback or the interior reflection. Weare much closer to a compulsive stuttering, to a divorce from realitywhere memories are not so much remembered as recited. As the pro-jections link themselves in constantly changing configurations, cer-tainty is further undermined by itinerant narratives.

If Douglas’ installation features fifteen intertitles, one of them—ATROPICAL ADVENTURE—is a direct citation from Alea’s film where itprecedes Sergio’s and Elena’s guided tour of Ernest Hemingway’sCuban residence. This clearly exemplifies Douglas’ notion of theremake. A remake is a moving image installation that enlists themultiple potentials of its apparatus to deconstruct its source in orderto tease out structural, thematic, narrative, visual, and political prin-ciples and arrangements, which are then redeployed. Such rigorousand creative analysis—an operation that enlists condensation,extraction, and exportation—reworks the source material as it worksout new arrangements, fresh remediations.

Other itinerant narratives include a reflection on the trauma of thecolonial legacy:

In an underdeveloped country there is no continuity,everything is forgotten. We waste our talents adapting toevery situation. Even those assholes in Miami, worms likePablo, blindly obey new masters.It’s colonial mentality: drop projects half finished, fail tothink things through to their conclusion, But that’s whatcivilization is: knowing how to relate things and not for-getting anything…that’s why civilization is impossiblehere. We live too much in the present.3

As these words travel in and out of scenes, they carry the traces oftheir prior positions, which they layer over each new scene. Strangeand unstable narrative hybrids are thus produced. But the voice-overis not untainted either. It does not have the godlike ability to impreg-nate images without being altered by the interaction. The videoinstallation remediates the voice-over in the sense that it, quite liter-ally, makes it another medium. As an itinerant voice-over succes-sively attaches itself to images in the space of the installation, itbecomes more than the reflection of an onscreen protagonist of thetype one meets in films. The space of the installation, and the artinstitution, both accent the utterance. This is the transversal action ofthe itinerant voice-over. It operates simultaneously with the voice-over’s inflection and re-signification of the images—or, verticalaction of the itinerant sound. In addition, the voice-over comes tocarry with it the trace of its various vertical promiscuities, theimages’ modulation of the voice-over, which it ghosts into eachencounter. This is its horizontal action—the traces of associationsinside and outside Douglas’ work.

When it was released in 1968, Memories of Underdevelopmentposed urgent aesthetic and political questions. Stan Douglas’ reme-diation of the film into a synchronized film installation imbricateshistorical events from 1962 and 1980 into an open-ended work thatcalls 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 Memoriesfor 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 tothe Art Gallery of York University, Toronto [April 19—June 25, 2006].