CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/16/2016

Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent

This film still from Stan Douglas' new six-channel film "The Secret Agent"—on view through April 30 at David Zwirner gallery—is reproduced from Ludion's gorgeous new book of the same name. Reviewed by Randy Kennedy in this week's New York Times, the film is an adaptation of a 1907 Joseph Conrad novel about a terrorist plot to blow up an English observatory, reimagined for Portugal during the post-revolutionary summer of 1975. "Douglas' The Secret Agent is above all a film about modernity," Jason E. Smith writes. "It is 'about' modernity, though, in a very special way: in the story, modernity is not merely evoked, it is targeted for attack… From the perspective of our present, to watch The Secret Agent is to measure the distance between the volatility of the time depicted—its modernizing dynamism, its opening onto an indeterminate future—and the present of the crisis, our crisis."