Le Détroit - An Experience rich in halftones
Frank Wagner

In «Le Détroit» Stan Douglas stages a horror story that is both banal and complex. He successfully builds up and reinforces the eerie aspects of the film with powerful camera angles, the nocturnal, lonely scenery and an unnerving soundtrack using exterior noises and the sounds of movement. At the same time he deconstructs the components that have come down to us through literature, film and television to make everyday things seem eerie and strange. Douglas's film is based both on his research into Detroit, which he captured in a series of photographs, and «The Haunting of Hill House», an occult ghost story by Shirley Jackson published in 1959. For this venture, Douglas constructed a complicated installation using two film projectors set up opposite each other. They double the projection of the film loop in mirror image on a screen suspended in the middle of the projection axis. The identical films are set to run minimally out of synch with each other. The time-space dimension of movement in space and the development of the film moving endlessly through the projectors means that the plot crystallizes only in the viewer's mind. So the story becomes an actual ghost story and the exhibition visitors become wanderers between the worlds. [more]

Obsessive repetition The ruined city as a phantasm of modernity A ghost story The visitor in the space and the dissolution of shadows Reference systems