Filmmaker Deborah Stratman on making the world you want to live in

Could you describe the path that led you to where you are today—to making experimental films and art across multiple modes, often about science and landscapes?

I think it’s true, what Antonio Machado says, that we make the path by walking it. I feel like every time I describe the path, it’s probably disingenuous to what the path actually was.

I can say that when I was younger, still in primary school and high school, I was compelled by the sciences. But at the same time, my friend group was pretty eclectic, a group of mathematicians, writers, artists. I think the thing we had in common was being less sort of organized-team-sport people and more into idiosyncratic queries.

We did a lot of collective activities, but we would come together around, well parties, like high school people do, but also dancing and the production of theater. I don’t mean organized theater on a stage, although sometimes it was that, but getting together and co-staging events. I think that left and lasting impression on me around the collective production of…I don’t think we thought of it as Art. It was more like community-building through oddball actions.

We would just go…now it almost seems more like flash mobs. We’d just orchestrate some sort of action at a particular place. I think because we lived in the suburbs, we had to band together and invent our own culture in a way that maybe you don’t have to if you’re in a bigger city where there’s all kinds of music and theater and film and art to see.

School-wise, I was into the sciences and was convinced I would take that path, but I had a break in college where I started to distrust that future. I mean, I think I was wrong but at the time I thought I would just end up working for some military industrial complex. I got suspicious of the money behind big science. And I started to wonder if there were other ways to engage the questions I had that felt less formulaic. I understand why Western science requires a certain set of questions and data sets and proofs. I was just looking for something more elastic.

I didn’t fall out of love with science, I just flipped my hobbies and my work focus. I had been an art hobbyist and thought that the sciences were a career path, and then it just flipped. Art-making became the career path and sciences became the hobby. But they stayed intertwined and motivating, even though a lot of my films have nothing to do with the sciences or even social sciences.

The reason film appealed to me as a medium is that it seemed to combine a lot of different strategies, both technical and conceptual. I liked that I could work with time. I liked that I could work with light and optics and use mechanical tools. I liked that I could work with sound, which is a major throughline across my body of work. I like to create space with sound. I like sound as subject matter.

Film, just holding a camera or the conceit of being a filmmaker, even though at that point was I a filmmaker? Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe you’re a filmmaker as long as you say you’re a filmmaker, but I hadn’t really made much. Anyway, just holding a camera gives you permission to approach subjects and themes without being a specialist in those subjects and themes. I love that. I love that I could be a dabbler and still have access to pursue all these different queries, whereas if I had tried to approach them through the sciences or just through any kind of higher degree in some subject I’d have to spend years finessing and specializing in. Whereas if you’re a filmmaker, you can skip from theme to theme and satisfy yourself to some degree with one, and then jump to another.

And it also feels like in science, the more you specialize, the more you communicate with fellow scientists. And the kind of idiosyncratic flash mob collaborative, well, collaborative at multiple levels in terms of appealing to a broader public that those aspects are, I mean, definitely don’t describe science or it just doesn’t feel as creative as the arts in quite the [same] way.

I think you’re totally right. On one hand, there’s that kind of deep knowledge of the specialist which is super valuable, but I think what you lose, as you say, is how broad your circle of communicants is. The same thing can happen with the more experimental films I make, where, because I’m stubborn about the form, and just want to make the film that the film itself wants to be, it can curtail distribution possibilities.

So in a similar way, I end up making films for a very particular audience. It can be a cloistered and somewhat hermetic conversation, which is part of what pushed me at one point to start making public sculptural work or try to work in ways where the audience isn’t on a pilgrimage to see art, whether a museum or a micro cinema, but they stumble across it. It may mean less people are engaged or stick around because they didn’t arrive with any plan. But on the other hand, you have a chance for the work, or the questions of the work, to interface with somebody who wasn’t looking for it. So it’s a more random field of exchange. I think we need more of that.

I would agree, as someone who goes on a lot of pilgrimages, but who also likes to collide into surprises that kind of throw you off your routine and your inner talk in a refreshing way. Your “day job” is teaching at the art department of the University of Illinois Chicago. How do you balance that with your creative work? And how do both help/hinder one another?

For me, teaching aerates the art making in a productive way. Part of that, and why I choose to stay at a state school is precisely for the kind of economic and cultural diversity that the state school makes space for. I have a privileged contract right now where I teach less than I used to, but I wouldn’t want to not be teaching at all, because I feel like it’s such an important place of co-producing what society is. Paying one another attention, being present, are such key parts of anything we want to engage with. To love anything, deep attentiveness has to come first. Teaching asks that of me; teaching forces me to be very attentive to everyone I’m in conversation with. That transaction of generosity with one another is good food for my creative life.

Also just to be a learner. Officially I’m the teacher. My name is the teacher in the classroom, but if you’ve ever been in a classroom, you know that everyone learns from one another. I like to be in that space of learning. It’s an essential site. It’s part of who I am as a maker and how I produce my chosen family.

Maybe it goes back to that group of high school friends and us coming together to produce society. It was less from a position of pedagogy back then, but still we were trying to make the world we wanted to live in. And I think to me, that still has to happen or it’s the goal, right? Many classes, it doesn’t happen. But that’s what we stumble towards.

What I love about your films, particularly the ones that explore science and the natural world, is the surprising way they layer sound, text, and image, which allow the viewer to feel their way to meaning. I mean, feeling seems to precede sense-making, and sense-making can occur on several levels, changing with repeat viewings. This is rather different from science and nature films that feed you information in an orderly and predictable manner. From a viewer perspective, it feels like the difference between foraging and spooning out pabulum. How did you strike upon this approach? And what do you think it offers, compared to more traditional storytelling shapes?

Nature doesn’t dole out orderly and predictably, so why should nature film? I’m not against order. I just think the West has gotten stuck in a storytelling groove that overly insists on the hero’s journey and orientation and causality. But I think more about circuits, meanders, cul-de-sacs, sudden drops into parallel worlds… this is why I like sinkholes. They’re unexpected edits in the landscape, a sudden thing that happens. It could be that I see them as edits because I’m a filmmaker—you’re somewhere and then, wham, you’re somewhere else. I’d say my approach chose me, not me it… because I’m somewhat constitutionally incapable of telling a linear story. But gathering ideas together into productive tension—that I can do.

As an audience member I like films that don’t pander, that trust me, trust their audience. That take film director Robert Bresson’s advice and hide their ideas, but so people find them. I do think that no matter how the story gets told, it fails if it doesn’t seduce. When you brought up feelings it reminds me of what Yvonne Rainer said, that feelings are facts…You can explain something to someone, and they can deny it. But if they feel something, they won’t forget it. I think you have to seduce the audience. They have to feel something to stay engaged.

I definitely agree, as a viewer. What feels distinct about your films, and also quite seductive, is the way they interweave “hard science” with threads evoking imagination, wonder, humor and politics. (I loved what you said in a previous interview, that they “stir together a poetics with a logics.”) Why are these qualities important to you?

Every methodology has its limits. When you have different legacies of expression or knowledge, and they get forced close together, they produce a charge. Or they destabilize one another. Which means there’s a chance they can be political. It’s like if you try pressing two negative poles of a magnet together…it makes previously unsensed forces evident by their resistance.

I think data distrusts fiction. And poetry distrusts logic. But maybe they should hang out more! Not to convince or assimilate one another, just to offer up an alternate path when the other falters. With Last Things and some of my other films, I’m making forms where Myth exists inside Reason, or vice versa, but where neither has to give up their otherness, or alienness, to the other. It’s a sort of ontological symbiosis.

Or productive friction? On that, have you encountered any films or books or artworks that spurred you towards how you wanted to create, by example or instructive counterexample?

I’m influenced by works all the time. This week the books out on my table are William R. Corliss; Anna Zett; Joyce Hinterding; Alanna Mitchell—she wrote The Spinning Magnet, about our magnetosphere; and the brilliant John Keene. There’s a monumental pile of concept-ancestors that everything I’ve ever thought or made comes out of. I’m basically a quotationist.

I love that phrase. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone describe themselves that way.

Walter Benjamin did! Or at least, a friend told me he thought of himself in that way. He probably didn’t use that word.

What is the typical process behind your films? Do you begin with an insatiable curiosity about, say, rocks or comets or a driving question or hook, like, say militarism or the most inland place in the world, and then follow the thread wherever it goes? Or is there a difference between the process of making what you’ve called “essayistic” films, compared to “event-driven” films or documentaries that are tied to a specific location or person, like Ray’s Birds or Kings of the Sky?

From film to film, I would say I aim for atypical processes. But it’s hard to avoid myself. The essays do take different approaches than the portraits. I’d say the subject always leads, but in the essay films the subject is a question, where in the latter it’s persons, or non-human persons. I’d say films like Ray’s Birds or Kings of the Sky, which you mentioned, are more driven by their human subjects than they are by their locations. But usually I’m more of a ground than a figure person.

What does that mean, that you’re open to spontaneous threads—or sinkholes that offer themselves up when you’re filming, even if they feel like digressions?

Artistically speaking, given a figure and a ground, I always pull more story, more narrative, and more meaning from the place, the setting, from the ground, than from following what a character does in that site. I’m compelled by location and sound, which produces space more than image. Being visually oriented is to focus on what’s over there, in front of you; when you’re sonically oriented, you’re inside it, in the bath of it. Sound evokes and suggests space more efficiently than sight. And sound can be figure or ground. Sonically speaking, I think of melody as figure, as protagonist, and rhythm or beat as the ground, or the architecture. I’m more comfortable with the bones, the architecture, the setting. Making a pilgrimage to a space to let the ground inform me motivates a lot of my practice. Like I said before, I’m incapable of telling a linear story.

You always circle back, though!

[laughs] In my circuitous, meandering, non-linear way.

You have said you really enjoy the process of the “dig”, of “piling up interesting bits”. A few viewings of Last Things inspired me to want to jump into all your piles—the JH Rosny books, Eliot Weinberger and the work of Roger Callois, among others. How do you know when it’s time to put away your shovel; to sift through your pile and start creating?

It’s a bit of an intuitive low grade panic alarm. A sense that if I kept researching, I’d lose sight of the making. External deadlines always help, too, if I’m working on a commission, or the semester’s about to start. All of those external pressures can be a huge help.

I love your strategy of “shooting when the world snags” you. What has been snagging you lately?

Lots of things. Cicada broods…in Illinois this year, there was a confluence of two broods of Magicicada, which show up once in 13 or 17 years, depending on the brood. I’m also into synchronous Eskista dancing, an Ethiopian dance form which I was filming this summer. Uprooted trees… a derecho tore through a park near me and toppled some giant trees, exposing their root systems. It was cool to see both above and below worlds exposed at once. Induction loop antennas—my partner and I are working on a new commissioned sculpture on the theme of remote sensing for The CLUI. Colonial Bacillaria paxillifer, a diatom that moves in an outrageous and fascinating way. I’m snagged by the song “Chant” by Worlasi & Senkulive, and maybe you will be too if you give it a listen.

Thanks! I now have a brand-new pile to dive into. Does this recording-by-snagging strategy extend to sounds as well as images? Do you sometimes find yourself recording strange or persistent sounds?

Yes! The cicada chants, for instance. I own lots of microphones. The newest one I bought is a Czech geophone, it records structure-borne vibrations. It’s like a contact microphone, but more sensitive to low frequencies. I’ve recently used it to record the sound of the elevator shaft in my studio building. When it moves, the sound travels through the structure and whole building vibrates sympathetically. It’s hard to speak about sound. I try but I just end up talking about its cause, not the sound itself.

Something about the technology you describe makes it sound like it’s capturing a felt, textural element of sound, like it’s also capturing an element of touch.

All sound is touch at a distance. It’s somatic. You’re literally touched by it.

What do you do in-between projects? How do you deal with your version of a blank page? Are there any reliable sources of new curiosities?

Film festivals are a pretty reliable source for new curiosities. It’s great to be able to travel to them again, after not being able to for several years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I love random programming discoveries. But watching a film has never unstuck me from a “blank page.” For that, sometimes it’s good to be stubborn, just stick with the page until something materializes. Other times it’s better to do an about-face and get busy with something utterly other. Also, inverting! Get some blood to your head.

I just did that myself. But I came clattering down. Your films are also distinctive for the unusual ways in which you use sound, in particular electronic and atmospheric music. How do you decide what aural palette belongs with a film? Does one come before the other (through, say, the choice of a collaborator), or do both progress iteratively?

I make ambient field recordings anyplace I film. I may not use that audio, but if I do, it brings its own palette with it. Otherwise, the music and sound spaces start suggesting themselves once I’m in the edit room. There are exceptions, like when I’ve been invited to work with a composer who’s already done the sound, which was the case with Olivia Block with whom I made Laika. That was basically a music video… with a preexisting score. The same was the case with Melissa Dubbin and Aaron Davidson with FF. For Xenoi, which I made with Michael Pisaro, the sound did not come ahead of the film, but the music was all in his court. If I’m doing my own sound design, which is most of the time, I start my heaviest audio trolling when I’m cutting. I mean, I’m listening to the same amount of things that I always do, but with a way more highly dialed-in attunement. I also do a lot of synaesthetic problem solving. Meaning I use sounds to solve visual problems. So that will impact the palette.

What creative habits or practices have stood you in good stead in the course of your career?

Unlined index cards. A standing desk. Small notebooks that fit in my bag. Reading… you can do it everywhere. [laughs] Repetitive metabolic things: jumping rope, swimming laps, walking, cycling, paddling, dancing. I wouldn’t say they’re trance-inducing, but it’s close to that. Some people can meditate without doing anything physical, but I can’t. Rhythmic things help me think and make. Hanging out with plants. Doing something that intimidates or disorients me. So many things that fit into that category…

Such as?

Going somewhere you don’t speak the language. Altered states of being. It’s good to break out of habits. We need them; they get us through days and life. It’s good to lean on predictable things but it can be hazardous. You may narrow your world instead of open it. Also: attention paying, in general, such a huge part of engaging and loving things.

Deborah Stratman Recommends:

The Light Eaters, Zoë Schlanger. She gave me a copy of her book when Last Things did a run in NYC. It blew me away.

The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington. She’s a painter and writer. Excellent at both. If you only know her paintings, run and get this book.

Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden. I keep coming back to it, especially with my next film.

Cafe OTO in London, a fabulous live music venue, which also stocks great recordings of music, and books about music, and which I finally had the chance to visit recently.

Your polling place. Go vote.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shruti Ravindran.

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