![]() ![]() Verloc, the secret agent of the title, exists in a kind of moral limbo, betraying his friends, while frustrating his employers by the low-level nature of his information. At times, some of the characters seem almost stereotypical, no more than emblems of the ideology they represent: the bomb-maker is as cynically amoral as the government official, the anarchists as muddle-headed as the police. It drips disgust both for the idealism and fanaticism that drives the anarchists at its centre as well as the cynicism and dull stupidity of those charged with countering them. Photograph: Stan Douglas/David Zwirner/Victoria MiroĬonrad’s satirical novel manages to be darkly humorous and simultaneously deeply pessimistic even by his standards. ![]() All this, one suspects, is entirely intentional – I doubt if the determinedly cerebral Douglas ever does anything accidentally – but, to what end?Ī small Soviet town with added sunchine … Stan Douglas, The Secret Agent, 2015. Though filmed on location in Lisbon, which looks like a Soviet small town with added sunshine, the accents are emphatically eastern European while the setting, dialogue and characters all evoke the claustrophobic atmosphere of a low-budget thriller. The film stays reasonably true to Conrad’s plot, while playing with the conventions of the cold war spy thriller and a certain strand of European social-realist theatre wherein the actors constantly draw attention to the fact that they are acting in order to disrupt the conventions of the audience-viewer relationship – think Brecht meets early Antonioni. The viewer is forced to stay alert and constantly shift their focus of attention from one screen to another. The narrative of The Secret Agent unfolds in a tense though steadfastly undramatic way on multiple screens in the darkened gallery, each scene shot from different viewpoints or played out alongside other incidents happening somewhere else at the same time. Photograph: Stan Douglas/David Zwirner/Victoria Miro ‘I consider photos to be like films without moving images’ … Stan Douglas, The Secret Agent, 2015. ![]()
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