Artist-filmmakers don’t like to make life easy for you. As a rule, there will be more than one screen to watch; no snacks, no comfy chair to sink into. Sometimes no chair at all. Stan Douglas is typically demanding. At almost an hour in length, the Canadian artist’s latest epic ‘The Secret Agent’ (a retelling of Joseph Conrad’s 1907 spy novella) plays across six large screens – two rows of three facing each across the darkness of Victoria Miro’s vast warehouse space. Sometimes the action takes place on a single screen, sometimes two, or more. To watch is to launch yourself across the room, spin on your heels and, very often, find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time (especially if you wuss out and occupy the benches in the middle of the room).
Such hindrances would send you packing were it not for the ways in which they heighten Douglas’s already super-tense drama. Conrad’s story deals with a terrorist threat in late nineteenth-century London. With an exquisite eye for retro detail, Douglas transfers the narrative to 1970s Portugal, and the aftermath of the country’s Carnation Revolution. There are countless shady assignations, a bomb, a paper bag full of money. And, as you find yourself caught between conversations playing on opposite screens – between officers and their superiors, spies and their handlers, a husband and wife – you become increasingly entangled in its convolutions of plot. Sure, this is clever meta-cinema, but Douglas isn’t just giving his medium a masterful workout, he’s exercising your legs, brain and heart as well.