Stan Douglas: Hogan's Alley was always thought to be a place of vice, a place of urban blight,
and so the city council always had it on their eye for a place to demolish.
[Railroad crossing signal clanging]
[whistling]
[Jazz playing on radio]
It got a reputation as being a Black neighborhood,
even though really it was a mixed Black, Italian, and Chinese neighborhood,
but it got that reputation from all the Black people that used to hang out here.
I'm an artist, and history is one thing I use to make what I make.
That white building is something called Vie's Chicken Shack,
where a lot of jazz musicians used to go after playing downtown Vancouver.
They weren't allowed to drink in the clubs where they played,
so they'd come here to have chicken and to party.
[Jazz playing]
[Man] Hey, Roy.
[Roy] How do, buddy?
[Man] Heh heh heh. You back in town.
[Roy] Just got back last night.
[Stan Douglas] This is a piece of interactive storytelling you can download to your phone
and actually play like a game.
As best we could, we tried to make a historically accurate representation based on public record.
Here's the Italian bootlegger.
[Man humming]
[Bell dings]
Here was a Chinese brothel.
[Woman] How much you pay your girls?
[Different woman] Hmm. I'm not hiring.
[Stan Douglas] I make my work so I can see it.
One major function of art is to allow us to see things we think we know in a different way.
[electronic music]
My first job after high school was as an usher.
My second job after high school was, um, as a DJ.
I was the first guy to play hip-hop in, um--in Vancouver.
I came to art late in life. I was more interested in theater.
I realized early on that in Vancouver these TV shows were being made,
these movies were being made,
so I could use the apparatus of cinema and TV to make my work.
[ambient music]
[Indistinct chatter]
The last 10 years or so, I've made these sort of very elaborate, very free remakes of other works.
I was researching the post-War period in Vancouver and realized from the images I was seeing
that Vancouver's part of this film noir world.
[jazz music]
In "Helen Lawrence," we're seeing two things simultaneously all the time,
the actors onstage and the cinematic image of the actors on the scrim.
At first, it's very confusing...
- What's your name?
but eventually, you learn to watch two things simultaneously.
- If I asked you to do a little something for me,
you think you could do it, no questions asked, on, the, uh, QT?
[Stand Douglas] We made virtual sets.
We built the entire neighborhood of Hogan's Alley.
Built two entire floors of the Hotel Vancouver.
- No. Take a walk!
- Come on. Get out of here.
[Stan Douglas] We have the actors on a blue screen stage.
They're being filmed by cameras, and then because we're in a blue background,
that can be taken away digitally like with the weatherman on TV,
and another background can be inserted behind them.
What is happening is we're making this thing live.
The cast is making a film in real time every night.
- Please don't spoil my fun.
I haven't had uch lately.
- I think I'll join you.
- You'll probably need a double.
[Stan Douglas] "Helen Lawrence" came from an epiphany I had about film noir.
Somehow, the behavior of people in film noir was based on the trauma of war.
The tough guys and femme fatales,
they're actually desperate.
They've done things they're not proud of.
- Spare a cigarette, hon?
[Stan Douglas] Killed people, seen people die around them.
- To help us all out, you...
[Stan Douglas] These themes of trauma, these are things which I go back to again and again.
I don't know why.
- You know, I think you would have been happy if I never came back.
[Stan Douglas] The fact that we can't really understand each other,
that we're kind of locked inside our brains.
This is something which I take as a starting point.
So behind me is the intersection of Abbott and Cordova.
That's the setting for my photograph, "Abbott and Cordova,"
but probably just above that "P" where the windows
open is more or less the vantage point of my image.
[building ambient music]
In the 1960s and early seventies, there were many hippies in Vancouver,
so they decided to have a festival,
and the cops didn't like this.
Often, with these--these works where I'm staging the photographs,
there's obviously documentation of that moment.
These documents do tell a story, but they're kind of partial.
What I want to do is to be able to condense these ideas.
We had to build a set.
We needed a lot of light to make that piece.
Almost always my works are allegories of the present, as well.
That event made this neighborhood what it is today.
After that event happened, the city's interest in the neighborhood declined.
There was a policy of containing drug use, vice, and poverty in this neighborhood.
My approach to looking at historical events is that historical events always have within
themselves the possibility of having been something else.
And the tension between different forces at play should not be forgotten.
I often depict minor histories, but I always try to depict a local symptom of a global condition.
[soft electronic music]
[Peter Courtemanche] So we're working on the soundtrack for a new video installation piece,
and this particular piece has 6 video screens.
[Brodie Smith] And each screen will have a pair of speakers, so making 8 speakers,
which is what we've set up here.
[Peter Courtemanche] They're just trying to get a sense of how all the sounds work together in the space.
[Brodie Smith] This one is called "The Secret Agent."
[Door opens]
It's completely different than anything that we've ever done before.
That will be exciting, but it's also quite complicated in terms
of the logistics of how are we gonna mount this.
- Blow up the Marconi installation at Sesimbra.
[Peter Courtemanche] We'll get a miniature version of it up and running in Stan's studio for a while.
- What are you supposed to be anyway,
anarchist, desperate communist?
- Anarchist.
[Brodie Smith] It plays back as a computer program, and so then we always run them for extended periods of time
so that we know that they're stable for an exhibition.
[Stan Douglas] "The Secret Agent" was based on the notion of terrorism,
which we're very concerned about these days, but it's been around for a long time.
"The Secret Agent" was the first literary depiction of terrorism,
but it was depicting anarchists who were active in the late 19th century.
- A man was blown up at Sesimbra this morning.
[Stan Douglas] The terrorists I was looking at are more based in the 1970s,
so this idea of taking an existing narrative
and restaging it in a way that reveals some hidden content there
or takes you to a different context is something that
has been a very huge source of inspiration for me.
[soft electronic music]
- Two of these are backwards.
- One should be backwards, right?
Let's take a look. It may just be a little bit out.
- Yeah, sure. Ok.
- I have nothing special to tell you. You summoned me.
- This one should go a bit more to the right, I think, too.
- Hold that.
[Indistinct chatter]
- Blow up the Marconi installation at Sesimbra.
[Stan Doublas] In "Secret Agent," there are 6 screens playing.
Always at least two are playing simultaneously.
There's more going on than you can actually pay attention to.
This kind of confusion is part of everyday life where we're not quite sure what's gonna happen.
- What are you supposed to be anyway, anarchist, desperate communist?
[Stan Douglas] In these works, a kind of parallax happens.
We see stereo vision through parallax.
Our left eye and our right eye allow us to see the
same subject from slightly different points of view.
This allows us to take in the two ideas simultaneously.
So the narrative of "The Secret Agent,"
if you think about what that meant in the 19th century,
think about what that meant in the 1970s,
this is a parallax through which we can view the same story in different ways.
- And when I walk in a crowd, I never let go of this.
A squeeze actuates the detonator.
[Stan Douglas] And these things of course relate to what we have now.
You see in a very real sense the consequence of terrorism,
of somebody saying to somebody else, "I'm better than you."
"I know the way you should live so much so that your life matters less than my act."
A few weeks after it premiered,
this terrorist bombing took place in Paris from people who were based in and around Brussels.
The show was shut down for many days because of terrorist fears.
History does not repeat itself.
Things do come back, symptoms do recur,
but they often recur because what caused it in the first place never actually went away.
In my work, I want to go back to look at these possibilities of
what if did not work out the way it did?
So looking forward, looking back,
I always want to consider that the thing we have is not necessary.
It's not the only way things could possibly be.
[soft electronic music]