Many artists make remakes, often with the goal of inquiring into their own role in the production of meaning and ideology. When Stan Douglas remade Journey into Fear (2001), a spy drama originally filmed in 1942 by Norman Foster and then made again by Daniel Mann in 1975, he was attempting to retrace the determining economic and political factors underlying the contexts in which each film had been articulated. Douglas explained that in the time separating the production of the two earlier versions the world had changed substantially: “The 1942 version was set during World War II while the context of the 1975 remake was the 1973 oil crisis—two events significant for the purposes of this project because the former initiates, and the latter roughly marks a halfway point in the transition from internationalism to globalism: the passage from a world in which power is brokered by politics to one in which finance is the preferred medium of influence.”¹ The action in Douglas’ version takes place on a freighter, and the dialogue between the person in charge of the cargo and the commander reveals this historic passage between the preeminence of politics and that of a globalized economy. The photographic diptych Journey into Fear (2001) consists of a film still that allows us to observe the set on which Douglas’ remake was performed. The ex-plicit reference of these two photographs to the “making of” genre functions to remind us that this fiction takes place in the context of a film production that is also involved in expressing a reality.

1. Stan Douglas, Journey into Fear (Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002), p. 5.