Reimagining Cuba

Film still from Inconsolable Memories, 2005. Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist/Art Gallery of York University.

What are “inconsolable memories”? The phrase, which forms the title of Stan Douglas’s new installation at Toronto’s Art Gallery of York University, has a peculiar, ambiguous ring to it. Can something inanimate, like a memory, be inconsolable? And if so, under what circumstances does it become that way?

Douglas has made a career out of tending to such thorny philosophical dilemmas. A pioneering member of the now-legendary Vancouver School of photo-conceptualists — which includes similarly well-heeled, internationally mobile artists like Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall — Douglas has recently committed himself to a string of elusive film works that challenge traditional modes of story-telling and history-making.

Typically, Douglas’s works remake older films and texts, and feature loops that rely on elaborate projection set-ups. For instance, Douglas’s 2002 film Journey into Fear quoted Orson Welles and Herman Melville (among others) and used a computer program to remix the dialogue in subtle ways. As a result, it was practically impossible to experience all the variations of the film — impossible, that is, unless you were willing to watch it for six days straight.

Douglas’s art, then, is itself an inconsolable memory: an elusive, tortuous, dream-like thing that refuses to be quieted — or, often, understood. With Inconsolable Memories, Douglas hits on a setting that seems to mirror this condition perfectly: post-revolutionary Cuba. Granted, Douglas’s outings are usually set in haunted milieus — Detroit, Germany’s now-gentrified allotment gardens, Vancouver’s seedy 100 West Hastings block — but never before has a place seemed so tailor-made for his handling.

“It’s a country full of evidence of an unfinished revolution, of these things that aren’t quite yet what they want to be,” says Douglas during a recent interview at Toronto’s Hilton Hotel. “The past is still somewhat present in those things. Here in North America, a building will be renovated or a place will be razed and we’ll forget that it was once there. But in Cuba, that’s not the case — it’s become a bit of a palimpsest,” he says, referring to a process in which an object has been effaced in order to accommodate and assimilate something new.

Panopticon, Islas de Pinos / Isla de la Juventud, 2005. Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York/Art Gallery of York University.

Inconsolable Memories comes in two parts. The first is a grouping of bright, crisp, large-format photographs that introduce viewers to latter-day Havana. Many are not of Habana Vieja (Old Havana), the touristy, picture-postcard section of the city, but rather of neighbouring areas like El Vedado, Cerro and Miramar. One photo of Miramar shows the old Soviet embassy, a worn, Brutalist monolith that sprouts incongruously, almost ridiculously, next to surrounding trees and telephone poles. Another pair of photos strays from Havana completely, offering breathtaking interiors from the Presidio Modelo on the Isla de la Juventud, a foreboding Modernist prison where then-president Fulgencio Batista put Fidel Castro in the mid ’50s, and where, ironically, Castro put counterrevolutionaries after his own ascension to power.

“There’s almost a genre of Cuban photography these days, which I hope I’ve avoided entirely,” says Douglas. “You know, a woman in white, smoking a cigar in front of a colourful building with an old Cadillac in the background. There are so many places in the country, too, where people are ready to be photographed. In Old Havana, people will offer to be your subject for a dollar.”

That Douglas effectively eliminates traces of Havana’s inhabitants from his photographs makes the city seem like a ghost town or film set. This gesture points viewers to the second part of Inconsolable Memories, its eponymous film component. As with Journey Into Fear and Douglas’s 2003 piece Suspiria (which mines Dario Argento’s 1977 baroque horror flick of the same name), Inconsolable Memories the film draws its plot and mood from an older source: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), a leading work of the Cuban New Wave of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Like Havana, Alea’s film proves fertile ground for Douglas. A languorous account of the bourgeois exodus from Havana after the 1961 American invasion at the Bay of Pigs, Memories of Underdevelopment assumes the perspective of its antihero, Sergio, a blasé Spanish intellectual who watches his wife and family emigrate while he stays behind in a kind of failed existential experiment. Douglas’s remake shifts Sergio’s should-I-stay-or- should-I-go predicament to a different context: the Mariel boatlift of 1980, a mass emigration from Cuba’s Mariel Harbour (under Castro’s blind eye) that included political prisoners, genuine criminals and people with apparent ties outside the country. Consequently, Inconsolable Memories becomes a bizarro version of Memories of Underdevelopment. Douglas makes Sergio Afro-Cuban and implies that the revolution made him a successful architect, rather than spelling the end of his career. Both Sergios, however, are psychologically stunted. Douglas’s Sergio eventually finds himself in jail; when given the opportunity to leave the country, he, like Alea’s Sergio, chooses to stay, jumping off the boat at Mariel Harbour and swimming to shore, only to meet an untimely end.

“It’s an unfortunate case of the revolution producing the same kind of personalities it’s trying to eradicate,” says Douglas. “The thing that struck me about Alea’s film was the idea of recycling and repetition in Cuba — Alea’s structure suggests this, with its flashbacks, flashforwards and news footage.

“Because of Cuba’s poverty, things have to be reused; they simply can’t afford to make brand new things, or to completely transform old things for a brand new purpose. I wanted to reflect this, to make a film that recycles itself.”

Film still from Inconsolable Memories, 2005. Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist/Art Gallery of York University.

As an installation, Inconsolable Memories actualizes this process. The film is printed on two reels, each containing different scenes, which are projected on top of one another in a loop. For most of the playing time, the scenes alternate across reels, with a printed scene from one reel running over a blank space on the other reel. Occasionally, however, shots on both reels will overlap to form phrases or provocative pairings of sounds and images. To complicate matters further, the reels aren’t the same length, resulting in a repetition of scenes from the shorter reel against unseen ones from the longer one. The effect is uncanny and hypnotic — sequences begin to resemble undulating waves or, as Douglas puts it, segments of a choral canon.

“When you go to see [Inconsolable Memories], you’re not going to watch a film or story,” says Douglas. “You’re going to a place.”

The place is Cuba-now and Cuba-then — and also, to a degree, a Cuba that Douglas fabricated in a Vancouver film studio. But it’s also a state of mind, one in which memory collides with hope and, occasionally, breaks it apart. In this sense, viewers can ignore the work’s many footnotes (Douglas insists his “demands on audiences are no different from those of other filmmakers”) and simply dwell on fragments of Sergio’s experiences. By doing so, viewers become an intimate part of the show, for they begin to imitate Sergio’s stab at meaningful self-reflection and at a useful interpretation of past events.

“People’s impressions of the installation will be completely determined by when they walked in and out of it,” says Douglas. “Everyone will remember the work differently. One person will watch it for half an hour, another will watch it for another half an hour. One person will see one scene first, another will see a different scene first, and so on. There’s an interesting, mutating quality here — actually, it’s a lot like real life.”

David Balzer is a Toronto-based writer.

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