The Ambitious Film Deconstructions of Stan Douglas

The Ambitious Film Deconstructions of Stan Douglas

Also: the nostalgia of Vacation sunscreen, Tiler Peck’s Jerome Robbins festival, and more.

A Powerful Stan Douglas Survey Dares to Imagine a New Future from the Past

At the center of Stan Douglas’s current survey at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art in Upstate New York is a new video installation with images so appalling and so hypnotic that I watched the work through three times. That video installation shares its name with, and remakes a portion of, D. W. Griffith’s three-hour silent movie Birth of a Nation (1915), a troubling cornerstone of film history that popularized editorial techniques still in u…