Stan Douglas’s Radical Retelling of ‘The Birth of a Nation’

‘Stay away or I’ll jump!’ Flora threatens from the precipice of an on-screen cliff. This is as much a warning to the viewer as it is to the soldier – now out of frame – who has chased her to this point in his attempts to convince her to marry him. The admonishment aimed at the viewer, however, is a call to keep their distance from questioning the narrative unfolding before them and the influence of the medium through which it is being communicated.

This tense moment unfolds across three of the five sequences that comprise Stan Douglas’s five-channel film installation Birth of a Nation (2025), on view at Victoria Miro, London. The work’s title is drawn from its source material, the infamous 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, which appears in one of the channels. The 13-minute section of D. W. Griffith’s original film included in Douglas’s installation marks a transition from a fragile, post-bellum promise of equality between formerly enslaved Black people and their white compatriots to the systematic erosion of civil rights in the ensuing Jim Crow period. In the excerpt, a Black soldier named Gus pursues Flora, a young white girl, who ultimately jumps to her death to avoid his advances. Subsequently, Gus – played by a white actor in blackface – is lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, instigating a violent clash that the KKK wins and after which segregationist policies are instituted.

While this 110-year-old sequence loops, the other four offer alternate versions of the same series of events. Douglas created new scripts for his own silent films that follow the events from the perspectives of four characters: Flora; Ben, a Klansman who discovers her body at the bottom of a cliff and lynches a Black man to avenge her; and two Black soldiers, Sam and Tom, who appear as a hallucinated amalgamation of each other to the white characters with whom they interact. These perspectives are notable because they reveal that Tom and Sam interacted with Flora on separate occasions, with neither pursuing her to the cliff. Instead, her death results from her prejudiced misidentification of the two men as the same person.

The act of misidentification, whether through prejudice or visual manipulation, along with the format of Douglas’s film, mirror how we consume contemporary events online, where numerous videos provide different perspectives – visual or discursive – of the same event. While, theoretically, each perspective contributes to an overarching narrative, their coexistence dampens the authority of any single angle. Douglas’s presentation, where new interpretations are given the same weight as Griffith’s original and are displayed at the same scale together, mimics the concealed impact of the endless scroll of information. Further, the range of viewpoints promotes a sensationalist reading akin to the intensity with which we experience events – from global atrocities to celebrity news – online. Douglas casts doubt on the divisive messages in Griffith’s film while reminding viewers that, in our current media landscape, false or malicious messages can easily sit alongside the truth and are often given equal weight.

The photographic series ‘The Enemy of All Mankind’ (2024) shifts focus from the story to its teller. The images reference John Gay’s 1729 comic opera Polly, in which characters disguise themselves as belonging to different races or genders for protection. Douglas plays with the shapeshifting element of his source material, changing the race of the originally white Captain Macheath to Black. This identity swap, whether in the colonial setting of the play or in the present, is equally charged, albeit to different effects. These photographs consider how identity – both that of the characters in the stories we engage with and our own – shapes our understanding. In both instances, Douglas asks us not only to look, but also to be aware of how we do.

Stan Douglas's 'Birth of a Nation and The Enemy of All Mankind' is on view at Victoria Miro, London, until 1st November

^{Main image: Stan Douglas, Overture: In which Convicted Brigand Captain Macheath is Transported to the West Indies Where He will be Impressed into Indentured Labour (detail), 2024, inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminium,1.5 × 3 m. Courtesy: © Stan Douglas, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner}