If Stan Douglas weren’t a filmmaker, video artist and photographer, he’d be a writer. He thinks like a writer. When he talks about his projects and bodies of work, how they come into being and how they develop, it is like listening to a novelist outlining a plot, setting a scene or describing a character. He provides a narrative frame in which stories and characters present and configure themselves, often in complicated situations. Douglas has been interested in written language for a long time. In Vancouver in the ’90s he attended the talks and readings organized by the KSW, the Kootenay School of Writing, a writers’ collective in which artists, writers and poets discussed the various connections among their art forms. The discussions at KSW were also resolutely political. Douglas has said that the KSW was a fundamental influence on his practice, the trace of which is evident in the ways that art and politics overlap in much of his work.
What is consistent about Douglas’s narratives is that they are always in flux. It is a literary convention that the epic poem begins in media res, so the reader enters the story in the moment of its occurrence. In this sense Douglas’s predisposition is epic (I am inclined to use that word to describe the amount and quality of his production, as well). Characteristically, there are no beginnings and endings in his work; as he says, “life is all middles.” He has gone to considerable lengths to reflect that temporal condition. Suspiria, a video made in 2003, is constructed from over 250 story fragments and two hours of music that together generate an infinite number of visual and aural sequences. In making it he designed a system that makes its own decisions. The effect is an inconclusiveness, a kind of parallax in which the same story is told in different ways. As early as Klatsassin, 2006, he took the example of the contradictory plots in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, 1950, and constructed what he called a “dub western” that investigated a murder from multiple perspectives.