Stan Douglas - Themes - Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Douglas has long been interested in the work of Samuel Beckett. In 1988 he curated Samuel Beckett: Teleplays, eight Beckett works for film and television. In 1991, Douglas produced Monodramas a series of short videos for television broadcasting, based on his studies of Beckett's teleplays. Developed for television, these 30- to 60-second video works were broadcast nightly in British Columbia in 1992 for three weeks. The short narratives "mimic television’s editing techniques" and when the videos were aired during the regular commercial breaks, viewers called the station to ask what was being sold. Douglas' first project for television, Television Spots (1987–88) consisted of twelve were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa during regular progamming and featured short, banal scenes in open-ended narratives. An early video work, Mime (the second part of Deux Devises, 1983) consisted of a close-up of Douglas' mouth in the shape of phonemes, which are then edited to sync up with the song "Preachin' Blues" by Robert Johnson. Douglas was not aware of Beckett's own work Not I, a disembodied mouth in a black screen. In a lecture given at YYZ Artists' Outlet in Toronto, Douglas commented that the choice of a blues song was

a fairly personal one, derived in a way from my experience of being black in a predominantly white culture, having very little contact with black American culture, but at the same time being expected to represent that to people-both to people who were antagonistically racist and to liberal types. So what you have is my image not quite synching up or relating to a very archetypal black figure, Robert Johnson.

Douglas began to study Beckett's works and his next video work Panoramic Rotunda (1985) came from misremembering a line from Beckett's FIzzle No. 7. The repetition and seemingly endless loops of the same narrative in Win, Place or Show recalls Beckett's use of repetition to point to but also undermine the "sameness" of reality. The absurdity of the forever repeating narrative, of the two protagonists in an endless loop, always the same words but from different points of reference is an allusion to Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot.