Retrospective 1 Retrospective 2 Masterclass article on Deborah Stratman

Deborah Stratman

Deborah Stratman (b. 1967) has worked with film and art installations since the 90’s. She lives in Chicago, where she also teaches at the University of Illinois. Stratman’s work and thought offers a vivid exploration of the gaping signification of filmic treatment of phenomena.

This year you have a unique opportunity to explore her films in two retrospectives, participate in her Masterclass, and read an introductory article here.

All of the film descriptions are courtesy of Deborah Stratman.

 


 

 

These events are supported by Fritt Ord.



 

Deborah Stratman: Retrospektiv 1 | Deborah Stratman: Retrospective 1
Fredag | Friday 19:00
(Total: 68 min.)


USA 2001 | Exp. | 3 min
Director: Deborah Stratman

UNTIED

«Et lite portrett av intimitetsovertredelse, og av å bryte fri fra mishandlingssykluser. Laget som respons på et år med sammenbrutte forhold og voldelige ulykker som etterlot meg knust, dislokalisert og fastlåst i leiligheten min.»

«A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy, and of breaking free from abusive cycles. Made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left me broken, dislocated and stuck in my apartment.»

Production: Deborah Stratman

USA 2006 | Exp. | 4 min
Director: Deborah Stratman

IT WILL DIE OUT IN THE MIND

«Tekstene er hentet fra Andrei Tarkovskijs film Stalker, hvor Stalkerens datter forløser hans ellers fordømte åndelige reise. Hun tilbyr ham noe mer ekspansivt og mindre forklarlig enn logikk og teknologi som de konseptuelle søylene for den menneskelige ånd.» Del av Den paranormale trilogi.

«Texts are lifted from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker in which the Stalker’s daughter redeems his otherwise doomed spiritual journey. She offers him something more expansive and less explicable than logic or technology as the conceptual pillar of the human spirit.» A part of The Paranormal Trilogy.

Production: Deborah Stratman

USA 2002 | Exp. | 33 min
Director: Deborah Stratman

IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE

«Bilder av forstads-overvåkning og vold som befinner seg på grensen av det virkelige.»

«Images of suburban surveillance and violence that push up against the limits of the real.»

Camera, Editing, Sound Design: Deborah Stratman | Music: Kevin Drumm | Cast: Joaquin DeLaPuente

Production: Deborah Stratman

USA 2005 | Exp. | 1 min
Director: Deborah Stratman

HOW AMONG THE FROZEN WORDS

«Inspirert av et kapittel i Francois Rabelais episke roman Gargantua & Pantagruel fra 1534, hvor Pantagruel oppdager at eksplosjoner, skrik og andre lyder fra en kamp som har funnet sted et år tidligere, har blitt fastfrosset i gjenkjenbare former – og at lydene kan bli frigjort ved å bryte eller smelte de frosne formene.» Del av Den Paranormale trilogi.

«Inspired by a chapter in Francois Rabelais’ 1534 epic novel Gargantua & Pantagruel wherein Pantagruel finds that the explosions, cries and other sounds generated from a battle that had occurred the year before have been frozen into discernable shapes – and that the sounds can be released upon the breaking or melting of the frozen forms.» A part of The Paranormal Trilogy.

Production: Deborah Stratman

USA 2007 | Exp. | 6 min
Director: Deborah Stratman

THE MAGICIAN’S HOUSE

«Noen ganger dveler det overnaturlige i de mest ordinære steder, bare hemmelig på den måten at dets spor forblir oversett.» Del av Den paranormale trilogi.

«Sometimes the supernatural lingers plainly in the most ordinary places, secret only in so much as its trace goes unnoticed.» Part of The Paranormal Trilogy.

Production: Deborah Stratman

USA 2013 | Exp. | 7 min
Director: Deborah Stratman

MUSICAL INSECTS

«Filmens temporalitet inntar temporaliteten til et trykket bokarbeid. En hyllest til Bette J. Davis’ illustrerte bok med samme tittel, som selv er en hyllest til insektverdenens små musikkskapere.»

«The temporality of film takes on the temporality of a printed work. In homage to a Bette J. Davis’ illustrated book of the same title, itself an homage to the small music makers of the insect world.»

Camera, Editing, Sound Design: Deborah Stratman | Music, Sounds: Disinformation, John Duncan & Max Springer, Ryoji Ikeda, L.O.S.D., Pansonic, S.E.T.I.

Production: Deborah Stratman

USA 2011 | Exp. | 14 min
Director: Deborah Stratman

...THESE BLAZEING STARRS!

«Helt siden vi begynte å studere kometene, har de spådd ulykke: katastrofer, messiaser, omveltninger og dommedag. En kortfilm om disse meteoriske, is-kjernede ildkulene og deres historiske bånd til guddommelighet, som kombinerer bilder av europeiske plakater fra det femtende til attende århundret med opptak fra NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.»

«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.»

Camera, Editing, Sound Design: Deborah Stratman | Music: Fontanelle

Production: Deborah Stratman

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Deborah Stratman: Retrospektiv 2 | Deborah Stratman: Retrospective 2
Lørdag | Saturday 17:00
(Total: 81 min.)

Director: Deborah Stratman
USA 2010 | Doc. | 7 min

RAY’S BIRDS

«Ray Lowden bor i den engelske byen Northumberland og eier syttito store rovfugler, fem rådyr og noen wallabyer. På tolv år har han vært borte fra jobb kun ti dager, og han elsker det han gjør. Filmen er en liten hyllest til hans vekselsvis sjenerte, bydende, nysgjerrige, stae og komiske rovfugler.»

«Ray Lowden keeps seventy-two large birds of prey, five deer and some wallabies at his place in Northumberland, England. He’s 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.»

Production: Deborah Stratman

Director: Deborah Stratman
USA 2014 | Exp. | 5 min

SECOND SIGHTED

«Dunkle tegn varsler en nær forestående, uforklarlig kollaps. En orakulær dekoding av lanskapet.»

«Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape.»

Editing: Deborah Stratman | Sound: Olivia Block

Production: Deborah Stratman

Director: Deborah Stratman
USA 2009 | Exp. | 52 min

O’ER THE LAND

«En meditasjon over et høynet trusselmiljø, som tar opp nasjonal identitet, våpenkultur, villmark, forbruk, patriotisme og muligheten for personlig transcendens. Av særlig interesse er måten amerikanere har endt opp med å forstå frihet, og de stadig voksende teknologiske gjentakelsene av forhåndsbestemt skjebne.»

«A meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence. Of particular interest are the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny.»

Camera, Editing, Sound Design: Deborah Stratman

Production: Deborah Stratman

Director: Deborah Stratman
USA 2014 | Exp. | 15 min

HACKED CIRCUIT

«Et koreografert portrett av Foley-prosessen, gjort i én tagning, som avslører mange lag av fabrikasjon og påbud.»

«A single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition.»

Concept, Sound Design: Deborah Stratman | Camera: Norbert Shieh, Nathaniel Elegino | Cast: Gregg Barbanell, Darrin Mann

Production: Deborah Stratman

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Deborah Stratman: Masterclass
Lørdag | Saturday 19:00
(Total: 90 min.)

Deborah Stratman (b. 1967) has worked with film and art installations since the 90’s. She lives in Chicago, where she also teaches at the University of Illinois. Stratman’s work and thought offers a vivid exploration of the gaping signification of filmic treatment of phenomena. In this masterclass, she will focus on ‘displacements’. Here are her introductory remarks:

DISPLACEMENTS
A brief consideration of how images and sounds get fortified by displacement. A gap gives us perspective, history, criticality, meaning – the interval orients us. There are many ways to define an interval: as duration or space, absence or presence, definite or indefinite, as lapse, refrain, shadow, ellipse, harmonics, memory, detachment, removal….etc. The class will focus on a few of these, including how distance defines a chord, or whether a chord can be sculptural.
– Deborah Stratman.

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THE NAME IS NOT THE THING NAMED: DEBORAH STRATMAN

One of the great virtues of Deborah Stratman’s films are how they cultivate a distinct and polysemic sense of wonder with the same type of technology that regularly trivialize, standardize and commodify our environment and attention. Both critical examinations and lyrical evocations of cultural and natural phenomena, her films could often be described as liberating poems and essayistic estrangements of status quo. This double quality has been a key for the curating of this retrospective of Stratman’s work.

In fear of reducing the complexity and thickness of the film’s imaginative operations and varied thematizations of things, they repeatedly deal with systems of surveillance and control, and the play of elementary forces that escapes or questions our verbal language and traditional, conceptual understanding. In this last regard, Stratman’s filmmaking can be seen in line with that of the French filmmaker and film thinker Jean Epstein.
For Epstein, cinema not only offered a radically new way of experimenting with perception, but a transformative transition in how we could conceive life. This is what Epstein calls ‘the ‘intelligence of a machine’, to use the title of one of his books: Cinema or what he calls ‘the cinematograph’ not only gives us new optics, but new forms of thinking – cinema can create new links and splits between things, and «reveal a new face of reality». As he confidently proposes on page 2 of this book:

«Whether for good or not, in recording and reproducing a subject, the cinematograph always transforms it, recreates it as a second personality whose appearance might confound consciousness to the point of asking: who am I? Where is my true identity? And this represents a notable attenuation of the certainty that we exist, of our ‘I think therefore I am,’ to which we must add: ‘but I do not think myself the way I am.’»

With vigorously inspired combinations of images and sounds, Stratman’s films suggest or create new ways of putting the world in perspective and lets us regrasp certain phenomena, giving us new forms of thought and perception, and using cinema to question reality in new ways. The title of her film The Name is Not the Thing Named (2012) is illustrative of this quality.

This materially specific work on perception is often linked, as suggested, to a reconfiguration of established systems of technologies of power. As in In Order Not to Be Here (2004), in where utilitarian technologies of dominance, surveillance and policing are turned into nightmarish figurations and tactile, affective images of oppression. For instance, an infrared image of an attack dog is turned from being a practical tool of power to become a haunted expression of a brutal reality. It’s as if the propaganda ‘reality show’ Cops was redirected by a restful romantic poet anguished and critical in a time prefiguring Snowden. In the brilliant Hacked Circuit (2014), Snowden will be explicitly evoked in a timely rumination on the art and technique of manipulating sounds in films.

In a world full of technocratic rationalities and banal images, Stratman’s cinema is an antidote of vivid imagination and critical questioning – using the potential of cinematic optics, sounds and montage to rethink phenomena. By presenting this retrospective and masterclass, we want to point to some of this potential, and draw attention to a filmmaker greatly engaged in both pressingly urgent and abiding philosophical questions.

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