Deborah Stratman
2021
The Illinois Parables
Deborah Stratman
C. Felton Jennings II, Anna Toborg
From dreamy aerial opening shots, we are sent on an expedition through the storied land of our fifth most populous state, Illinois, often called a miniature version of America. Deborah Stratman’s experimental documentary explores how physical landscapes and human politics can each re-interpret historical events. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism, and resistance. Who gets to write history—physical monuments, official news accounts, or personal spoken-word memories?
The Illinois Parables
Kings of the Sky
Deborah Stratman
Adil Hoxur, descended from a line of Dawaz tightrope artists, performs nightly with his troupe in China’s Taklamakan desert, among the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy. Shot over four months, this experimental documentary takes shape as a travelogue, ethnographic visual poem, and advocacy video for the preservation of a traditional art form. - MoMA
Kings of the Sky
The BLVD
Deborah Stratman
An experimental documentary about the street drag racing scene on Chicago’s Near West Side. This is a rambling, textured film about obsession. It is about the mythos of speed for its own sake, and it is about waiting. While waiting, The BLVD exposes community, inner-city landscapes and nomadic experiences of place. The film treats storytelling as a living medium for determining history. And it commands respect for those who transform cars, or anything else, through passion.
The BLVD
From Hetty to Nancy
Deborah Stratman
Images of the austere Icelandic landscape form the backdrop for readings from a series of letters written at the turn of the 20th century. Majestic waterfalls, open plains, a ship loaded with protesting sheep, a boat in icy waters, snow capped peaks, and icy roadways are punctuated with Hetty’s ironic stories of quotidian events with her female companions. Her accounts are juxtaposed against historic texts about the Icelandic people overcoming the cataclysmic forces of nature. - MoMA
From Hetty to Nancy
These Blazeing Starrs!
Deborah Stratman
Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured disaster: catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. …These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when star gazers were translators, explicating the sky more intuitively for predictions of human folly. Comets are now understood as time capsules harboring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. Today we smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles - it’s just the manner of divining which has changed.
These Blazeing Starrs!
Vever (For Barbara)
Deborah Stratman
Barbara Hammer
Deborah Stratman brings past perspectives into the contemporary moment in a montage of unfinished film footage from artist Barbara Hammer with evocative sound, texts, and teachings from artist Maya Deren. Vever poetically draws connects between three generations of women filmmakers who separately, and now together, have taken on unknown challenges, and opened themselves up to reinterpretation in their filmmaking practices.
Vever (For Barbara)
Optimism
Deborah Stratman
John Steins, Steven Badgett
The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find gold in alluvial gravel is part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, smelters, former city officials, and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot on location in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.
Optimism
Ray's Birds
Deborah Stratman
Ray Lowden
Ray Lowden keeps seventy-two large birds of prey, five deer and some wallabies at his place in Northumberland, England. He has had ten days off in twelve years and loves what he does. The film is a little homage to his variously coy, imperious, curious, stubborn and comic raptor menagerie.
Ray's Birds
The Name is not the Thing named
Deborah Stratman
In support of experiences that are essentially common, but to which language does not easily adhere, the video passes through places that are both themselves, and stand-ins for others. The title is taken from Aleister Crowley’s 1918 translation of the "Tao Te Ching."
The Name is not the Thing named
Kuyenda N'kubvina (Walking Is Dancing)
Deborah Stratman
Relatively little export, cultural or otherwise, reaches the west from southeastern Africa. Spurred by curiosity about how knowledge of place spreads, Kuyenda N’kubvina looks at how thought and culture propagate in Malawi. Weaving our way through video halls, book stores, radio stations and dance floors, in cities and small villages, we meet Malawians who traffic in rhythm and ideas. The video was instigated by the filmmaker’s ignorance about the people and culture of this region, and accompanies her as she seeks out individuals and infrastructures that channel and articulate Malawian identity.
Kuyenda N'kubvina (Walking Is Dancing)
