The Brooklyn Rail

Contemporary filmmaker and photographer Stan Douglas’s project Nu•tka (1996) documents the terrain of Nootka, off the coast of present-day Vancouver Island, of the Mowachaht-Muchalaht Indigenous people. Douglas presents its mountainous horizons, pine tree vistas, and tapering seashores as two near-identical six-minute montages dissolving from one terrain to another. Using an atypical form of superimposition, he overlays and merges these montages as razor-thin horizontal stripes. The shots, interlocked and playing simultaneously, are slightly out of sync, occasionally aligning in the form of an uninterrupted image before rippling into a collaged amalgam once more. Voices overlap as narrators, assume the roles of colonists Esteban José Martínez and James Colnett. Although their voices remain distinct, they occasionally speak identical passages, reflecting the images’ occasional synchronization.

Intentionally fractured and obfuscated, Martínez and Colnett’s refurbished monologues-as-dialogue recounts their interactions with Nootka and includes excerpts of period gothic fiction influenced by landscapes impacted by resource extraction and exploitation from eighteenth-century Spanish and English colonization. Together, the landscapes and voiceovers form an audiovisual abstract tone poem capturing Nootka’s merged dynamic history and present. Douglas articulates the island’s story through the visual vocabulary of ethnographic filmmaking distorted by television static. Nu•tka•, one of many works featured in Douglas’s current solo show Ghostlight at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum, also establishes the artist’s propensity for his version of collage filmmaking. Editing celluloid, the act of clipping and re-fusing disparate strips of film into a cohesive narrative, lends itself to this comparison of repurposing images or objects to form original works of art, like Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963), a combination of animal limb and leaf pressings, and Godfrey Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi (2002), primarily composed of manipulated stock graphics.

Douglas deviates from merely recontextualizing or reimagining existing images—he is a veritable multigenre chameleon, precisely embodying the modalities of documentary and narrative photography and filmmaking while employing techniques of collage filmmaking. For instance, in “2011 ≠ 1848”, a photography series featured in Ghostlight, Douglas seamlessly collages dozens of individual-subject studio photographs into intricate recreations of American riots and protests. The digital precision of Douglas’s period photography is striking, highlighting the persistence of political, police, and environmental injustice that fuel activism and progressive change. Douglas also wields this anachronistic hyperdetail to historical recreation in other photographs like his “Disco Angola” series (2012) and Hogan’s Alley (2014).

Curator Lauren Cornell deftly and thoughtfully intersperses Douglas’s photography with his short films, alternating the Hessel’s sundrenched galleries with sequestered screening rooms, appropriately balancing communal halls with more intimate spaces for reflection. Cornell’s curation categorizes the ways in which Douglas employs collage filmmaking across media. In his short film Hors-Champs (1992), for example, Douglas separates edits into multiple channels. However, unlike Nu•tka•, Hors-Champs features two simultaneous channels projected onto opposite sides of a screen. The first channel is a television edit of a band’s improvisational jazz session, with seamless cuts between soloists and the ensemble, maintaining a focused eye on the participating musicians. The second channel is an inverse of the first, featuring shots of resting musicians waiting for their cue to resume playing and the camera to focus. Here, Douglas’s filmmaking incorporates footage that would otherwise end up on the cutting room floor, underscoring dualities of absence and presence in filmmaking.

Douglas similarly calls attention to historical continuity through stylistic mimesis by employing techniques of collage filmmaking in his latest project, Birth of a Nation (2025), his thirteen-minute recreation, dissection and reimagining of a pivotal scene from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film of the same name. The Birth of a Nation, which was racist propaganda vilifying emancipation, glorified and reignited the Ku Klux Klan, forming a new epoch of American white supremacist terrorism. Douglas’s film examines a pivotal scene from Griffith’s film, wherein Gus, a Black army captain (Walter Long, in blackface) propositions Flora (Mae Marsh), a white woman, for her hand in marriage after a chance encounter in the woods. Flora runs away in disgust and Gus chases her to the top of a cliff, subtextually threatening to rape her, from which Flora throws herself to her death. A Klan mob led by Flora’s brother Ben (Henry B. Walthall) pursues Gus, ultimately lynching him.

Richard Brody of The New Yorker examines the contradiction between Griffith’s messaging and its perception by antiracist audiences today, writing, “Throughout [Birth of a Nation], Griffith’s pro-Confederacy feelings are grossly apparent; yet his depiction of events—his representation of reality as he understands it—involves the inclusion of much that departs from his intentions.” Brody goes on to cite the same scene Douglas reinterprets as an example of how Griffith intended to present a racist lynching as “just, even heroic” while also “com[ing] off as obscene and horrifying” by today’s standards. Douglas’s film foregrounds this dissonance through its perspectival variety.

Douglas’s installation features five contiguous channels, three in the first row (which I will refer to as Channels 1, 2, and 3) and two in the second row (Channels 4 and 5). While the Hessel Museum’s presentation of Douglas’s Birth of a Nation in a spacious screening room allows the visitor to reflect and rewatch the film if needed, the immediate effect of five monochromatic channels running simultaneously and depicting the same narrative remains disorienting. Douglas intentionally overwhelms the viewer by having them plumb the film’s tangled, at first disjointed imagery for its distinct accounts, challenging them to assume the role of film editor. Channel 2 features Birth of a Nation’s original scene, in which Griffith employs dangerous stereotypes in his portrayal of an implied sexually aggressive Black man, whom Long plays with exaggerated, buffoonish mannerisms, pursuing the trope of an innocent white woman. Griffith romanticizes Flora’s choice of suicide as “sweeter [than] the opal gates of death,” or the preferable alternative to marrying a Black man, while depicting Gus’s lynching as a necessary triumph over barbarism. Channel 3 marks a deviation from the original scene’s events entirely, shifting perspective away from the scene with Gus and Flora while assuming the perspective of Flora’s Klansman brother Ben.

Channel 1 depicts the scene’s events from Flora’s perspective. The negative spaces of morning light flooding through windows with partially-drawn curtains in Flora’s living room foreshadows the white, triangular hoods of the Klansmen venerated by Griffin’s film and presented with austerity by Douglas’s. Flora (Paulina Knaak) is shown weaponizing her whiteness, a carefree guise and taking extreme measures to profile and victimize herself against the Black men she encounters. Douglas’s interpretation of Gus’s character further enumerates the ways in which white people weaponize their discomfort as a tool of white supremacy. In Channels 4 and 5, as well as Channel 1, we gain more insight into Gus’s perspective, which Douglas splits into characters Gus (Francis Faye), Sam (Terrance Livingston Jr.), and Tom (Joachim Moore).

In these channels, Douglas reimagines Griffith’s blocking. In Douglas’s film, Gus does not pursue Flora, instead having a short, mutually flirtatious encounter which Flora eventually rebuffs, and the two uneventfully part ways. Afterwards, we see Sam/Tom (Sam in Channel 1, Tom in Channel 4), a Black hunter, encountering Flora at the cliff. From Flora’s perspective, Sam is standing too close to her and appears angry. From Tom’s, he’s standing at a greater distance and attempts to appeal to her mounting hysteria. It is only later, after visiting the local pub and retracing his steps in the woods, that Gus realizes the Ku Klux Klan wrongfully accused Sam/Tom of chasing Flora to her death—while none of them are in fact responsible, a guilt-stricken Sam ends the film preparing to run away and start anew. Channel 4 cuts from Tom’s perspective to Moore’s as he shoots the scene of Tom’s lynching in front of a bluescreen, calling attention to the continuum of Griffith’s film from a century ago to today.

In the aftermath of renewed debate surrounding the necessity of extricating public spaces from Confederate statues, Douglas has characterized The Birth of a Nation as the Confederacy’s most successfully enduring monument, both in terms of its valorized subject matter and the film’s permanence in the annals of narrative filmmaking. While the film presents racist rhetoric and revisionist history, The Birth of a Nation remains noteworthy and highly influential as one of the first bona fide blockbusters and as an early entry into the “realist” genre of filmmaking, a film rising above novelty by juxtaposing epic, technically ambitious sequences with mundane domesticity and human melodrama.

As a Black artist, Douglas’s critical, subversive engagement with film history’s most infamous antiblack propaganda is intentional in its own right. As a filmmaker, his exploration of Birth of a Nation emphasizes and challenges the techniques popularized by the film, and by extension, the foundations of film history, of whose lineage he is a part. Unlike a Confederate statue, The Birth of a Nation cannot be toppled or concealed—it is firmly enmeshed in film history and filmmaking to this day can be traced back to techniques that are commonplace today, including close-up shots of actors, large-scale battle sequences, and more naturalistic mise-en-scène. Douglas, aware of this, uses Griffith’s film as a conduit for challenging the racist foundations of the medium while highlighting the ways in which its influence manifests today.