Much has been written about the "cinema effect" in contemporary art.

One symptom of this effect was the recent ascendancy of the remake as genre and strategy. Remakes of moviesclassic, cult or obscurehave taken on the form of the video installation to invade museums for well over ten years. The works of Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, and Douglas Gordon provide the most sophisticated examples of this practice. At their best, remakes rework films to extract structures and arrangements that speak to the films historical moment as well as to the context of the remake. Many other works are much less fortunate. This "cinema effect" and the remake have been explored from two different disciplinary contextsfilm history/criticism and art history/criticism. Interdisciplinarity has yet to contribute to this subject. For most film historians, the museum has now become the last refuge of independent filmmakers since the cinemas new economy has excluded them from its traditional spaces. The museum is, in a way, the intensive care unit of experimental film. The shortcoming of this axis of analysis is that critics fail to tackle the spatialization that the installation operates. In contrast to the cinema experience, viewers are mobilized in moving image installations. They walk in on the work, and leave at various times. They stay for varied durations, and position themselves in relation to the projection surface and the moving image in infinite ways. Finally, the prism of film criticism falls short of any analysis of the relation between onscreen space and the
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space of the gallery. It lacks a spatial vocabulary that links film technique with performance and installation practices. In turn, most art historians lack the requisite knowledge of film historyand of the disciplines with which the cinema has always sustained an intimate dialogue, namely literature and theatreto discern what is at stake in many video installations. They consider moving installations from the installation side, scrutinizing the architectural, sculptural, and performative aspects of the work while missing their connections with the footages syntax. What appears new and exciting to the visual art critic is often clichd for the historians of the cinema and theatre theorists. This explains much of the unfortunate work we see in many exhibitions todayspectacular or seemingly rigorous for some, yet terribly clich for others. As artists are exploring an ever expanding field of performance practices such as dance, opera, and puppetry, the challenges presented by moving image installations are multiplying. Failures of the critical apparatus aside, moving image installations nonetheless remain todays most probing works. Their unique contribution is the pressure that they concomitantly exert on the histories, theories, media, and institutions of art, film and cinemaand, in some cases, on popular culture. These installations reactivate debates that, buried deep within modernisms, their avant-gardes, and histories, have been played out through the policing of the borders of the institution of fine arts and the cinema, the containment of film,

STAN DOUGLAS INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES: ADAPTING SYNCHRONY

TEXT / SYLVIE FORTIN

Inside front cover: production image from Inconsolable Memories, two synchronized asymmetrical film loop projections: 16mm black and white film, sound, 15 permutations 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 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)
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sound, painting, and sculpture as media, and the concealment of their barters and intersections. Promiscuity is the operational logic of moving image installations. They map out the legacy of this intimacy between art and the cinema. They also track down the actuality of their exchange, and ultimately reveal sustained dialogues that require us to reassert promiscuitys yield and revisit our institutions, theories, and histories. These installations thus destabilize the boundaries that have foreclosed a more complex understanding of avant-garde practices. Stan Douglas most recent body of work, Inconsolable Memories, comprises a screenplay, photographs, and a synchronized black and white 16mm film installation. The photographs were produced over the course of the two years when Douglas was researching and developing this project. In addition to their multifarious relations to the film installation, the photographs are themselves engaged with what now amounts to something like a photographic genreCuba photographed. These images are thus in a critical dialogue with the dominant ways of representing Cuba today, be it by Cuban photographers or foreigners. Douglas Cuba images pressure the norms that guide Cuban photographers representations of their environment as well as the well-rehearsed exoticism that dictates what foreigners, including photographers, have come to see in Cuba. Devoid of human presence, Douglas images nonetheless reveal environments shaped by traces of human action and layers of intervention. They are compendia 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 century Spanish bastion that, provided as temporary shelter to a family in the 1980s, is still their residence. It is flanked by a Communist-era apartment building on the left, and opens onto a beach. A bicycle leans outside a courtyard on the right. Mariel is one of Cubas shores closest to Florida. It is the location from which over 125,000 people fled for the United States in 1980. The photograph thus condenses references to multiple chapters of Cubas 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 the revolutionHabana Libre. Besides its focus on the buildings name change, Douglas historicization relies here on subtleties of photographic language rather than on the traces of history on the built environment. The camera angle, the cropping of the building, and the all too insistent vultures distance this photograph from aggrandizing modernist architecture photography and its cousin, the document of the socialist projects modernizing success. In this image, the flight of vultures occupies as much of the image as the hotel itself, whose upper stories diagonally float into the image. The roof-bound antennae are further dwarfed into pathetic needles. Finally, the Havana Hilton/Habana Libre name change reveals itself to be a nomenclatural synchronization with the regime of the daya synchronization that is also at play in Douglas film installation. Inconsolable Memories is a synchronized film installationtwo 16 mm films are projected simultaneously onto a single screen. It is not a remake as such, but rather an adaptation of Toms Guttirrez Aleas 1968 film, Memorias del subdesarrollo [Memories of

Underdevelopment]. Douglas defines the relationship of his project to Aleas film by writing that "aspects of this project were derived from" it.1 Aleas 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 against imperialism became an international project. Relations between Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and the fight for civil rights in the USA to name only a few sites of strugglewere both articulated and disseminated. Memorias del subdesarrollo was set in 1962. This is revealed by references to Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, television broadcasts of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Mariel Boatlift and the Reagan/Bush Florida campaign locate Inconsolable Memories in 1980. "Was there a revolution no one told me about?" Sergio asks himself repeatedly in Inconsolable Memories. Douglas adaptation layers two markers of Cuban revolutionary history, ghosting one in the other, and yielding insights into questions of race, gender, and urban/rural relations. 1962 and 1980 are thus dialectically juxtaposed. Sergio is no longer a white bourgeois landowner; he is now a black architect. His wife, Laura, is now the wealthy one, who leaves him her familys Vedado apartment after she emigrates to Miami. Elena, the young uneducated woman with whom Sergio has an affair in Aleas film, is recast as a mulatto analyst and translator of American broadcast media who is so successful that she has been given Sergios comfortable apartment when he is imprisoned.

all black and white images are film stills from Inconsolable Memories, two synchronized asymmetrical film loop projections: 16mm black and white film, sound, 15 permutations with a common period of 5:38 minutes, edition of 4 (courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York)

Aleas 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 documentary and fiction, script and improvisation. In addition, it makes extensive use of flashback and repetition. Many of these features are adopted and adapted by Douglas, who uses black and white film for a number of effects. First, the black and white format allows him to stay closer to Aleas film vocabulary. In Douglas installation, black and white is also a medium of historicization. In addition, it is a reflection of economic reality. Here, black and white does not so much signify a specific period or nostalgia, but points to the prolonged use of black and white stock in Cuban film production. A Cuban filmmaker may well have used it in 1980. Ultimately, here, the use of black and white induces a suspended time, a two-way traffic between 1962 and 1980. This suspension, in turn, further opens the work to our interpretation, our traffic with it in 2006. One of the two film loops is comprised of thirty segments; its duration is 28:15 minutes. The other comprises eighteen segments, and lasts 15:57 minutes. The work is punctuated by combinatory titles. The longer loops features five sequences that combine an image and an adjectiveA FAMILIAR, A TROPICAL, A FORGOTTEN, AN ENDLESS, ANOTHER. The shorter loop features three nominal sequences on blank backgroundsSITUATION, ADVENTURE and PROBLEM. Adjectivesmodifiersare therefore the textual elements bound with specific images. Nounsnamesare the free radicals that attach themselves to scenes and sequences, temporarily defining them. The work features fifteen different configurations,

which one can experience in 84:45 minutes. The projections briefly fade to black between sequencesa further suspension, and a form of temporal punctuation. While images are never overlaid, musical and narrative sequences are synchronized so as to inflect a number of scenes successively. The reconfiguration that relentlessly informs this installation transcends questions of montage. While scenes follow each other in different ways to transform the story, and to prevent it from crystallizing, much more is at play. Three spoken narrative fragments successively attach and free themselves from a number of visual scenes. Significantly, these itinerant voice-overs are precisely those that Douglas borrowed more closely from Aleas film. These are the tape-recorder incident, a reflection on the devouring work of language, and a contemplation of the traumatic social aftermaths of colonialism. The tape-recorder incidenta fight between Sergio and his wifesignificantly appears twice in Aleas film (once as a flashback). In Douglas installation the footage of Sergio starting and stopping the recording is silent footage. It can thus be incessantly inflected by the audio/narrative with which it temporarily coincidesthe altercation with Laura that follows Sergios recording of her indictment of revolutionary Cuba and declaration of her decision to leave; two different version of Los Van Vans Llegue Llegue; a reflection on the politics of language; and the realization that everyone Sergio knows is gone. These itinerant audio sequences, in turn, attach themselves to other images: Llegue Llegue accompanies Sergios escape, and so on. Each time a new combination occurs, it acts retrospectively and prospectively. It destabilizes and recontextualizes its own prior occurrence, and prepares us for its next permutation. As these are predominantly voice-over reflections of the protagonist Sergio, it is as if Aleas film were running in Sergios head as he endlessly recites these monologues, attaching them to various scenes. We are way past the flashback or the interior reflection. We are much closer to a compulsive stuttering, to a divorce from reality where memories are not so much remembered as recited. As the projections link themselves in constantly changing configurations, certainty is further undermined by itinerant narratives. If Douglas installation features fifteen intertitles, one of themA TROPICAL ADVENTUREis a direct citation from Aleas film where it precedes Sergios and Elenas guided tour of Ernest Hemingways Cuban residence. This clearly exemplifies Douglas notion of the remake. A remake is a moving image installation that enlists the multiple potentials of its apparatus to deconstruct its source in order to tease out structural, thematic, narrative, visual, and political principles and arrangements, which are then redeployed. Such rigorous and creative analysisan operation that enlists condensation, extraction, and exportationreworks the source material as it works out new arrangements, fresh remediations.
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Other itinerant narratives include a reflection on the trauma of the colonial legacy: In an underdeveloped country there is no continuity, everything is forgotten. We waste our talents adapting to every situation. Even those assholes in Miami, worms like Pablo, blindly obey new masters. Its colonial mentality: drop projects half finished, fail to think things through to their conclusion, But thats what civilization is: knowing how to relate things and not forgetting anythingthats why civilization is impossible here. We live too much in the present.3 As these words travel in and out of scenes, they carry the traces of their prior positions, which they layer over each new scene. Strange and unstable narrative hybrids are thus produced. But the voice-over is not untainted either. It does not have the godlike ability to impregnate images without being altered by the interaction. The video installation remediates the voice-over in the sense that it, quite literally, makes it another medium. As an itinerant voice-over successively attaches itself to images in the space of the installation, it becomes more than the reflection of an onscreen protagonist of the type one meets in films. The space of the installation, and the art institution, both accent the utterance. This is the transversal action of the itinerant voice-over. It operates simultaneously with the voiceovers inflection and re-signification of the imagesor, vertical action of the itinerant sound. In addition, the voice-over comes to carry with it the trace of its various vertical promiscuities, the images modulation of the voice-over, which it ghosts into each encounter. This is its horizontal actionthe traces of associations inside and outside Douglas work. When it was released in 1968, Memories of Underdevelopment posed urgent aesthetic and political questions. Stan Douglas remediation of the film into a synchronized film installation imbricates historical events from 1962 and 1980 into an open-ended work that calls 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 Unin, 1965. The title of the novel was changed to Inconsolable Memories for 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 21May 8, 2005], at the Venice Biennale, and at The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver [January 13March 12, 2006]. It travels to the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto [April 19June 25, 2006].