Revisiting Stan Douglas’s ‘Cinema Of Operations’

Abstract

Stan Douglas had pioneered film and video installations inside the gallery walls in the 1980s, before the ‘cinema of exhibition’ – to borrow critic Jean-Christophe Royoux’s term – became a notable trend in artists’ moving-image work since the 1990s.1 Indeed, Douglas’s major works of the 1990s and 2000s led this trend in their attempts to renew the space and time of narrative cinema in ways that transcend the confines of the standardised cinematic apparatus in the movie theatre. In so doing, they also attempted to transform the perceptual and mnemonic dimensions of cinematic spectatorship, whose canonical model is predicated upon the stably intertwined coordination of the frontal screen, a single projector and a limited span of a film’s running time. In Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (2016), I proposed ‘spatialization (materializing the spectatorial experience of the film image, montage, and narrative in the theatrical or architectural forms of screen-related apparatuses) and temporalization (manipulating the time of the image by means of digital video’s capacities) as two key operations that video technologies execute in adopting and altering the components and historical traces of cinema’.2 In this vein, I characterised Douglas’s ‘recombinant’ video installation works (pieces that combine narrative units – scenes, dialogues, soundtracks, visual cues, etc. – that originate from other existing materials such as film, television and literary or historical texts) as being able to ‘re-temporalize cinematic narrative to the extent that goes beyond the viewer’s threshold of perception’.3