The whole film, says Stan Douglas, is a bizarre racist fantasy. I watched it numerous times - but then stopped because I was so horrified. The Canadian artist is talking about The Birth of a Nation, one of the most controversial films in Hollywood history, a three-hour silent drama directed by DW Griffith based on an earlier, obsolete novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. After its release in 1915, it provoked riots across the US for its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. The film is widely deemed responsible for reinvigorating the Klan's reputation and bolstering its membership. Despite attempts to ban it, The Birth of a Nation broke box-office records.
It takes place in the US south during the civil war (1861-65) and the ensuing Reconstruction era. It follows members of the pro-Union, abolitionist Stoneman family and the pro-Confederacy Camerons. The plot takes in the founding of the KKK, using white actors in blackface. Douglas first thought about remaking The Birth of a Nation 20 years ago when he was doing a series of movie recreations. He abandoned the project but returned to it recently when Los Angeles gallery The Brick invited him to make a response to the removal of Confederate monuments in the US south. The ideas of identification, self-identification and imposed identification, he says, speaking via Zoom from Vancouver, all came together in my concept.
Douglas, 64, was born and raised in a white, middle-class neighbourhood in Vancouver. In the 1980s, alongside artists such as Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Vikky Alexander, he was part of the Vancouver School, a group of young artists responding to mass media imagery with conceptual, postmodern photography and films. He studied at Vancouver's Emily Carr College of Art, but just as important were the years he spent working as a DJ at a gay bar in the city. Eventually, he quit - I got tired of spending all my money on dance records - but DJing still shapes his art: How to play the right part of the song at the right time; using culture to make new culture; using time-based media to make an idea or a feeling.
A master of the remix, Douglas is known for films and photographs that splice together the lowbrow and the lofty, turning fiction into fact, suturing landscapes and reshuffling the past. Previous works include an immersive six-hour video of an improvised jam session by a fictional 1970s band, while he has used photography to recreate the crowds at major riots around the world. He has also reworked films by Alfred Hitchcock, Dario Argento and Orson Welles. His latest show, which has just opened at Victoria Miro in London, features his remake of The Birth of a Nation.
The original film explains many aspects of US culture. The idea of whiteness comes from the 17th century, he says. Indentured labourers, black and white, were working together. The idea that whiteness was inherently superior—with the possibility of upward mobility, a solidarity with the elite—didn’t happen until 50 years into the slave trade. This would be around 1670. It was enforced by the repetition of these ideas in legislation, in churches and in town squares.
Birth of a Nation, as Douglas has called his five-channel work, remixes a particularly chilling and violent scene from the 1915 film into a 13-minute installation. Silent and shot in black and white, in keeping with the original, it focuses on a scene in which Gus, an emancipated slave played by a white actor in blackface, meets the chaste young Cameron daughter, Flora, in a forest. He proposes marriage. Appalled, Flora runs away and hurls herself off a cliff. Gus is subsequently lynched by the Klan, the mob being led by Flora’s brother Ben.
In Douglas’s version, one channel plays the original scene, while the other four screens carry his remakes. His Flora is a far less sympathetic figure, who lobs stones at a bird for amusement, then trips and accidentally falls to her death. Meanwhile, other sequences contradict the narrative of the original. Douglas invents two black male characters called Sam and Tom. Like Gus, they are also freedmen who have become Confederate captains.
Gus is recast as a kind of hallucination, who appears to the white characters whenever they see Sam or Tom, blurring their identities. “To them,” explains Douglas, “all black men are the same black man and are not to be trusted—a source of sexual violence.” Although the original film is more than a century old, Douglas finds some of its conflicting ideas very current, from the suggestion that “the US nation could only be born by undoing black suffrage” to the suppression of voting rights. “The Klan was the agent to take care of that,” he says of the latter, “to make the US a white supremacist society.”
Douglas has produced work on this theme before. His 1991 video I'm Not Gary sees a white man mistake a black man for another called Gary. The black man responds with a frown and says: “I’m not Gary.” The 30-second video briefly made it on to Canadian TV, part of a series that ran during ad breaks. Confused viewers called the station to complain.
Douglas's last major exhibition in Europe included the film ISDN, made for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. In a 16th-century former Venetian salt factory, he installed a two-screen call-and-response between TrueMendous and Lady Sanity, from London, and Cairo-based rappers Raptor and Yousef Joker. Douglas found connections between the politically charged mahraganat - Egyptian street music that emerged during the Arab spring - and the Tottenham MCs' lyrics about race, injustice and uprising. "That period of grime," he says, "was a soundtrack for the 2011 protests in London."
Douglas is also "a big fan of opera", which is what drew him to 18th-century British dramatist John Gay. The second part of his Victoria Miro show is a series of photographs,The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay's Polly. These restage scenes from an obscure 1729 comic opera by Gay via large-scale staged pictures shot in mountains of Jamaica with Hollywood production effects. They feature American and Jamaican actors dressed in detailed 18th-century costume (borrowed from New York's Metropolitan Opera). Written as a sequel to Gay'sThe Beggar's Opera,Pollyshares its theme of misidentification and racial perception but with a very different stance. "It's a crazy story," he enthuses. "It depicts imperial patriarchal hierarchies of race and class as performative."
The opera follows the capers of the eponymous protagonist Polly through the Caribbean as she tries to find her exiled husband - an escaped indentured labourer who is now a pirate called Macheath. Considered too piquant a satire at the time, with its blunt critique of Britain's colonial ambitions, it was censored by the government and never performed in Gay's lifetime.
Like an 18th-century Some Like It Hot, it has an outlandish plot that involves subterfuge, skirmishes, colonial settlers, courtesans, a Maroon queen and pirates aplenty. Douglas sees pirates as radical political figures. “Back then,” he says,“pirate ships weren’t like in the Disney movies. They were like democracies on water.” His interest stems from his ongoing research into Maroon societies—large communities who escaped chattel slavery in the Americas and formed their own independent, free societies. In Jamaica,some of these thrived for centuries.
Piecing together pivotal moments from the opera,The Enemy of All Mankindis a flamboyant visual romp with deliberately preposterous titles to steer you through the action. It gives an alternative image of history,but even here things ultimately fall apart.The pirates are defeated and,in Gay's original,Macheath is executed.Douglas smiles.This whole idea of liberation,he says,has a dark side that always comes back on itself.