The Guardian, interview by Charlotte Jansen
2025
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.” Read more