February 2, Thursday, 7:30PM, 2006
Director's Eye: Deborah Stratman

Balgan welcomes Deborah Stratman, primarily a film/videomaker who works in other media including photography, drawing, sound and architectural intervention. She is currently soliciting public responses about fear and evacuation routes for a calendar project in Texas. Her recently acclaimed film "In Order Not To Be Here" examines anxiety, surveillance and suburban environment. Her latest film, Kings of the Sky, documents the travels of a tightrope troupe in East Turkestan. She was recently in Laos as photographer and facilitator for the Photo Archive Group’s Living Photographers of Laos project and is presently working on some short films about falling. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois-Chicago and is currently a visiting instructor at Cal Arts

How Among The Frozen Words She Found Some Odd Ones 32sec., video, 2005

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 can be released upon the breaking or melting of the frozen forms. - DS

On the Various Nature of Things 16mm, 25min, 1995

A 24-figure exploration of the natural forces at work in the world, based on Scottish physicist Michael Faraday's 1859 Christmas lectures to the public. The film literally, metaphorically and whimsically reinterprets scientific convention to illustrate physical concepts.Faraday felt people needed to be more aware of the everyday reality of physics and how its laws affected their simplest actions. So in the late 1850s, he addressed the English public on the subject. He arranged for a series of lectures to be held, as a tradition, on Christmas day.
As Faraday put it, "We come into this world, we live, and depart from it, without our thoughts being called specifically to consider how all this takes place.” The filmmaker takes up his challenge and considers the world around her with an infectiously playful, yet sometimes dark, curiosity.

The film is an homage to Faraday's enthusiasm and his tactile approach to science. He was also a filmic forefather, having invented and experimented with one of the first kinematascopic devices. The film challenges the viewer to see beauty in the small details which surround us but go unnoticed or are taken for granted. "I say apparently," says the physicist, "for you must not imagine that, because you cannot perceive any action, none has taken place".

The BLVD 64min, video, 2005

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. - DS

“With a painter’s eye and a storyteller’s love of the great yarn, Stratman gives us a portrait of a sub-culture inside Chicago’s Black community that really puts us in that place at that time. ...Stratman brings her own personality to the work and interaction with the filmmaker becomes an important part of her telling of the tale. Stratman’s love of detail and of her subjects, not to mention their respect for her in return, give The BLVD an immediacy that transcends any technology.” - Mark Rance, Film Forum LA