Deborah Stratman

From its distinctive neighborhoods to its architectural homes, Los Angeles has been the backdrop to countless movies. In this dazzling work, Andersen takes viewers on a whirlwind tour through the metropolis' real and cinematic history, investigating the myriad stories and legends that have come to define it, and meticulously, judiciously revealing the real city that lives beneath.

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?

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."

A meditation on freedom and technological approaches to manifest destiny.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The frenzied detritus of trading floors, smart weaponry and the religious right are woven through the petrochemical landscapes of Southeast Texas. This short video harangue questions land use policy as it serves the oil industry, patriotism as it absolves foreign aggression, and fundamentalism as it calcifies thinking.

Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks. A humid take on minerals, where sci-fi meets sci-fact. The geo-biosphere is a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.

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.

Susuratti is an installation by Deborah Stratman and Rob Ray. Susuratti is part of Experimental Sound Studio's Florasonic series in the fern room at the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago, IL.

A video letter to Nancy Holt, made in homage to a shared interest in terminal lakes, framed views, monuments and time. Filmed on and around the Great Salt Lake, Mono Lake and Meteor Crater.

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.

Inspired by a chapter in Francois Rabelais' 1653 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 could be released upon the breaking or melting of the frozen forms.

A single-shot portrait of the Foley process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition, which is dedicated to Walter Murch and "Ed Snowden."

Film time takes on book time. An homage to a Bette J. Davis' illustrated text, itself an homage to the small music makers of the insect world.

The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, aloof observants to human conditions.

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.