Critics reviews

Chicago-based artist Deborah Stratman has been using her 16mm camera to hunt down meaning in exterior and interior spaces for going on 30 years now. In The Illinois Parables, she tells 11 obliquely affecting stories, located at once in the past and present, of human dramas that played/are playing out in her home state.

While Stratman's eye for lost landscapes is striking, the film is also a showcase for her characteristically evocative sound design, associative montage, and meticulous research... What emerges is a disquieting sense of the inextricability of history and place, the feeling that time haunts the landscape in deep and tangible ways.

At a time when America's marginalized once again face an uncertain future, Deborah Stratman's wise, rueful essay The Illinois Parablesserves as a timely reminder that history has always pressed hardest on the disenfranchised. Stratman's approach is akin to a precise archeological excavation performed on the oft-ravishing landscapes of the Prairie State that pepper her film.

With pensive shots set to a richly-detailed soundtrack, Stratman allows the language of the setting—natural, built, imagined—to speak. The voiceless people within it try to embed their own idioms, or objects, into it: antiquaries, flags, signs, bones.

Digging through the archives of her home state to reveal how currents of migration, racism, genocide and disaster have literally been etched into the landscape, experimental director Deborah Stratman offers up a dense and often mesmerizing film essay with her latest work, The Illinois Parables.

The Birth of a Nation flattens out a crucial episode in our national story into a simplistic revenge narrative and presents itself as definitive. It's a saddening truth of commerce and taste that far more people will ever see Parker's work than Stratman's, but I'm hopeful The Illinois Parables will be more _remembered_ by those who see it.

Stratman's essay film transforms the fifth-largest US state into a teeming, mythopoetic palimpsest. ‘The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space,' Foucault said, almost a half-century ago – and yet Stratman's film urgently explores such questions, sensitive to the layers of history, the displacement and violence, that haunts contemporary Illinois.

At first glance, they may not seem to fit together so seamlessly, but placed in chronological sequence, the "parables" speak in dialogue to one another about historical occurrences of exodus on different terms. It's the sort of approach to a cinema of historicizing that combines journalistic rigour and formalistic articulation, a meeting place of fact and fiction that provokes discovery and philosophical and sociopolitical reflection in equal measure.

Comprising eleven chapters that encompass fourteen centuries, the sixty-minute film, shot in 16mm, catalogs a history of calamities — natural, political — in the Land of Lincoln. Stratman often juxtaposes static, serene landscape footage with an increasingly agitated soundtrack, arriving at an odd consonance amid so much dissonance.

What results is a cyclical narrative of endurance and erasure at the hands of ideology, natural and supernatural destruction, technological advancement, faith, and resistance. Taken as the violent fallout of when abstract conviction in the name of historical necessity or science meets implementation, it's a tale that cannot help but feel prescient in our current political atmosphere. The hope, then, is that we are willing to hear it.

Even more diverse than the film's historical material is its eccentric mash-up of styles and approaches, which come coupled with a soundtrack that combines Gregorian chants, Arvo Part, haunted church organ, and various snatches of midcentury blues and pop music. Stratman has a phenomenal eye... Her camera draws out geographical patterns that echo across the state—and in a few subtly perception-skewing shots, across museum exhibitions and paintings.

The Illinois Parables does nothing by the numbers, constantly redefining its approach... Threading the needle between the abstruse and the didactic, Stratman takes a cacophony of documents, murals, dioramas, testimonials, plaques, and other markers on the land, and locates strange harmonies among them.