Stanley Park by Gary Indiana

Showing at this years Whitney Biennial, Gary Indiana presents his film Stanley Park. Shot in Bucharest, Sofia, Budapest, Vancouver BC, Toronto, and Cuba, Stanley Park is an homage to the great stage and film director Werner Schroeter and a meditation on the surveillance prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, realized in five circular structures on the Isla de la Juventud during the Machado dictatorship between 1926-1928. The prison complex was used exclusively to incarcerate political prisoners, including Fidel and Raoul Castro (who in turn used it for their own political prisoners), until it was closed in 1967.

The film combines doctored and retouched sequences from Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL, von Sternberg’s THE SHANGHAI GESTURE, Feuillade’s LES VAMPIRES, and Werner Schroeter’s FLOCONS D’OR with original footage. With music by INGRID CAVEN, BABYSHAMBLES, POULENC (Dialogue of the Carmelites), MOGWAI, THE KINKS, SIDNEY BECHET, WAGNER (Tristan and Isolde), ZARA LEANDER, THE DOORS, GLENN GOULD (The Solitude Trilogy) and JOSEPHINE BAKER.

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