ONE NIGHT ONLY!
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM (This event is $10)
To mark the 20th anniversary of Deborah Stratman’s IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE, Spectacle presents a special screening with the generous support of Video Data Bank. Alongside the filmmaker’s unsettling nocturnal tour through suburban non-places will be four more shorts from Stratman’s inimitable body of work that showcase her deft investigations of optical technology and land use, stretching from the Canadian Yukon to the cosmos.
Stick around after the show for a remote Q&A with Deborah Stratman and Joaquín de la Puente, the show stopping “running man” of IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE.
IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2002
USA, 35 min
In English
Composed entirely of night-time footage set in empty parking lots, stores and suburban neighborhoods, this haunting piece illuminates suburban America’s spiritual vacancies as well as its physical ones. The static banality of these spaces become more ominous as Stratman weaves in allusions to the mechanisms of police violence and surveillance that maintain the apparent safety and comfort of these environments, culminating in a breathtaking finale as an anonymous man (Joaquín de la Puente) makes an inhuman effort to escape middle-America’s panopticon.
…THESE BLAZEING STARRS!
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2011
USA, 14 min
In English
In this found-footage essay film, the mystic associations ascribed to comets in classical belief systems are juxtaposed with the empirical gaze of NASA experiments. Though the modern probing of celestial bodies strives for objectivity, Stratman’s deployment of these films defamiliarize these objects in hallucinogenic fashion to outline a long, futile tradition of human beings attempting to augur truth from the stars.
HACKED CIRCUIT
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2014
USA, 15 min
In English
Stratman returns to the subject of surveillance in this seemingly unsuspicious demystification of sound design in Hollywood filmmaking. A tracking shot that ventures from the street and into a recording studio observes a Foley artist record noises for a climactic scene in Francis Ford Copolla’s paranoid thriller THE CONVERSATION. As the invisibility of this craftsmanship takes on a parallel to the invisibility of the state’s all-seeing eye, Stratman’s camera floats back into the night and leaves us to question the unseen forces governing our daily existence.
OPTIMISM
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2018
USA/Canada, 15 min
In English
Assembled with Super 8 footage shot while working in Dawson City, Canada, this small town symphony observes the day-to-day existence of a sunless snow-swept world living in the shadow of a 19th-century mining boom. While the wealth obtained through the theft and extraction of native land from this place have left it, denizens of the town’s period-themed casino grasp for their chance to strike gold.
LAIKA
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2021
USA, 5 min
In English
The legacy of space test dogs, both pioneers and fodder for scientific progress, are paid tribute in this music video for experimental composer Olivia Block.
Deborah Stratman is an artist and filmmaker based in Chicago, Illinois whose work has been featured at venues and festivals around the world, including MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Austrian Film Museum, Sundance, CHP:DOX and TIFF ‒just to name a few. Alongside a large and diverse filmography of short films, Stratman has brought her distinctive modes of experimental documentary filmmaking into several acclaimed features, such as O’ER THE LAND (2009) and THE ILLINOIS PARABLES (2016).
This showcase would not be possible without the support of Video Data Bank. Special thanks to Bradley Eros and Benji Santos.
