DEBORAH STRATMAN: CONSTELLATIONS

For this special edition of Field Recordings, filmmaker Deborah Stratman is a guest at WORM for an evening featuring seven of her short films. In her work, Stratman brings together voices, images, and the material the universe is made of - frozen sound, light, floating bodies - and leaves their connection to the viewer.

Vever (for Barbara) - 2019, USA, 12 minutes, English
Vever is built from two unfinished projects: footage Barbara Hammer shot in 1975 at the furthest point of a motorcycle journey to Guatemala, and texts by Maya Deren about failure, encounter, and initiation in 1950s Haiti. Three artists from three generations search for possibilities outside the power structures they themselves are part of. A vever is a drawing used in Haitian Vodou to summon a loa.

Optimism - 2018, USA, 14:43 minutes, English
In Dawson City, Yukon, the valley lies in permanent shadow for part of the year. The film connects the desire to pull sunlight downward with the search for fortune in the gravel - two sides of a long history of desire and extraction in the remote Canadian north. Can-can dancers, curlers, ore smelters, former city officials, and a mirror disc on a cliff side together form a portrait of the city. Shot on Super 8, with music by Charlie Chaplin.

Immortal, Suspended - 2013, USA, 5:50 minutes, no dialogue
Suspense in multiple meanings: levitation, stillness, preservation, and tension. The camera moves through a space within a space, while the identity of the places continually slips away.

The Paranormal Trilogy

How Among the Frozen Words - 2005, USA, 44 seconds, no dialogue
Based on a passage from Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which Pantagruel discovers that the cries and explosions of a battle fought a year earlier are frozen into visible forms, and the sound is released once those forms break or melt.