DEBORAH STRATMAN: CONSTELLATIONS

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Constellations follows a running thread through Stratman’s work: the search for spirituality and connection, across species, matter and generations. In Vever (for Barbara), Stratman assembles meanings from fragments of discarded footage and writing by Barbara Hammer and Maya Deren, sketching out her own feminist lineage. In keeping with the dialogic form, The Magician’s House is a letter to a friend with cancer, in which the camera holds on to a presence in a house full of ghosts. This existential thread continues in Immortal, Suspended, which moves between the spiritual and scientific, opening up the possibility of transgressing the gravity force. In Order Not to Be Here depicts ubiquitous American suburbia. Defamiliarising what is deemed neutral, the film interrogates the fear of otherness, obsession with security and social alienation.

Formally varied, from the energetic ultra-short found footage films (How Among the Frozen Words, It Will Die Out in the Mind), to rigorously composed In Order Not to Be Here, to more observational and rooted in history Optimism, Stratman situates her practice in a constellation of forces, kinships and histories, exploring for film’s capacity of more than mere representation.

Vever (for Barbara) – 2019, USA, 12 minutes, EnglishVever is assembled from two abandoned projects: footage Barbara Hammer shot in 1975 at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip to Guatemala, and texts by Maya Deren on failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti. Three makers across three generations look for possibilities outside the power structures they are themselves part of. A vever is a drawing used in Haitian Vodou to invoke a loa.

Optimism – 2018, USA, 14:43 minutes, EnglishIn Dawson City, Yukon, the valley lies in permanent shadow for part of the year. Optimism connects the wish to draw sunlight down into it with the search for fortune in the gravel, two sides of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, ore smelters, former city officials and a mirrored disc on a cliffside together form a portrait of the town. Shot on Super 8, with music by Charlie Chaplin.

Immortal, Suspended – 2013, USA, 5:50 minutes, no dialogueSuspension in several senses: levitation, cessation, preservation and suspense. The camera travels through a space within a space, and the identity of the sites we are looking at keeps slipping away.

How Among the Frozen Words – 2005, USA, 44 seconds, no dialogueAfter a passage in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which Pantagruel discovers that the cries and explosions of a battle fought the year before have frozen into visible shapes, and that the sound is released the moment those shapes break or melt.

It Will Die Out in the Mind – 2006, USA, 3:50 minutes, EnglishA short meditation on the possibility of spiritual existence and the paranormal in the information age. The texts are taken from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, in which the Stalker’s daughter offers something more expansive and less explicable than logic or technology. The title comes from a passage on time in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed.

The Magician’s House – 2007, USA, 5:45 minutes, no dialogueSometimes the supernatural simply lingers in the most ordinary places, and its trace just goes unnoticed. The Magician’s House is a letter to a cancer stricken friend, a filmmaker and alchemist, and at the same time a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid. The house is full of ghosts, among them that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the magic lantern. The music, La lutte des Mages, is by the Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, who held that most people move through the world in a kind of waking sleep.

In Order Not to Be Here – 2002, USA, 33 minutes, EnglishShot entirely at night on 16mm, in emptied suburbs, car parks, gas stations and office plazas. The film looks at how privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance sha