The experimental artist/filmmaker about her latest movie Last Things.

We met Deborah Stratman, whose latest film Last Things screened at this year's Viennale, during a break between film screenings and her urban exploration tours by bike. As an experimental "featurette", as Stratman calls the film, Last Things will probably not get a theatrical release, but films by the Chicago-based filmmaker can be streamed via dafilms. On her website, Stratman gives the following brief description of what Last Things is about.

Bohema: Take us through the evolution of your movie. How did it the idea develop, how do you work?

Deborah Stratman: In terms of the larger themes, it just started from a low grade general anxiety about the extinction and the predicament that we've put ourselves and every other species in. So when I read the Rosny stories [ed.: The Boex brothers, who wrote under the pseudonym J.-H. Rosny, are regarded as early pioneers of science fiction], especially The Death of the Earth, but also Les Xipéhuz, I felt like I could make a film to help process this feeling to partly chew the ideas around extinction and try to think in a less species-specific way, to relieve the pressure so that you're not just going down with depression. That’s what science fiction does so much of the time. It’s a social portrait, but slightly deflected into the future. A lot of the science fiction that I enjoy talks about the sociopolitical but is able to transpose it just a little bit.

Around the time that I started filming, thinking it would be a fiction of sorts, I was here in Vienna, went to the Natural History Museum and saw the minerals, which I had already seen before. But then I read about how minerals have evolved over time and the film just opened up for me. I thought, let's speak about minerals just as they are, which is as an evolving form. And I realized that I could try to have both sci-fi text and sci-fact text joined together.

Then it's just research, really. Reading and looking and reading and looking and slowly collecting material that I gravitate towards and then ending up with way too much. And then having to edit, edit, edit, remove, remove, remove and back down to something manageable. I finished this film over a year ago and my studio's totally covered in all the books and research.

Science/Fiction

B: Talking about the combination of fact and fiction, which is a big part of the film. How do you think they influence each other? How do you see the aspect of fiction in science and the aspect of science in fiction? 

DS: Part of putting the science fiction really close to the science factual delivery is that we're not used to having them as such close neighbors. We listen in such different ways to those modes of describing the world. You start to notice what stories draw your attention more. Which stories you believe more. I think for some viewers it's a struggle or they'll just hear one part and not so much the other. And then others are annoyed by it and then others are like “oh, okay, amazing - here's more or less the same thing but from another perspective.”

B: After the screening you said that sound is what puts you in the film. When you claim that credibility is about recognizability would you even go as far as to say that sound is superior to the cinematic image then?

DS: Sound definitely is what puts you in the film. Sound is what makes the space, more than image. Sound a/effects our trust because it's so connected to emotion and because sound is touch, basically. You feel a vibration. It's touch, but at a distance. It’s a way of knowing that's so immediate that it's hard not to trust it. Besides someone actually touching you, sound comes the closest to being able to kind of shake you, grab your shoulder, grab your attention. So I think it's very manipulative. It affects us really, really strongly.

B: You work a lot with electric sounds and they are not natural. They're manipulated.

DS: I wasn't super conscious about using this type of sound for the more fictional sections in this type of film, for the most part, except for vis a vis the voice. I think if you're watching a film, it's all manipulated. Everything is manipulated. I'm one of those people who doesn't really believe in the word documentary, because as soon as I introduce the recording device, I'm changing the situation or I'm making an edit because I'm filming one thing and not the thing behind me. Even if I'm trying not to impact what's happening, of course it's still impacting it. And I'd rather just declare that and say, okay, it's all on a scale. For me documentary has more to do with an openness to accidents and an openness to the world affecting or changing what I shoot as opposed to having more control. It’s like a scale of control, more than reality versus lack of reality. We all know fiction can sometimes get to the truth a lot faster than documentary can. 

B: The two voices you use - the scientist and the storyteller - are quite different in tone and language.

DS: When you hear Marcia’s [ed.: “Marcia Bjørnerud is a structural geologist whose research focuses on the physics of earthquakes and mountain building”] voice, the scientist, even if you don't understand English, the tone she's speaking in says something. The idiom says something very different in the lecture mode or the interview mode than the storyteller mode that Val is speaking in. Their words, of course, were impacted, but also their delivery. We know, even if you don't know Marcia, that she's giving a lecture of sorts or interviewing from the position of ‘these are things I know about and I'm going to tell them to you.’

And we know from hearing Val’s voice that she's taking you on this journey. She's more like, okay, get in the boat, we're going somewhere.

The grain is quite different, you know, even the pitch and the tone. We recorded Marcia over Zoom. You lose a lot of frequencies. It's a bit harsh. You go from Val’s voice to Marcia’s, from seductive to flat. It's quite a shift that your mind has to make that slows the films down. 

Polytemporality

B: A different perception of time is a very central theme of your film.

DS: I knew that I was waiting for a word to describe that phenomena, and I just didn't know what it was. As soon as I read the term “polytemporality” in Marcia Bjørnerud’s book Timefulness, I thought that's exactly the word I've been trying to think of, to describe how to just get out of our own skin a little bit. 

We’re used to thinking of that in terms of empathy for other species, empathy for other languages, other kinds.

But I don't think we tend to think of it temporally. Except for geologists. I've worked with some before and realized that they read everything as a text. They can see the rock, the sediment, the cliffs as an amazing text. And they can position themselves in their time frame. That's so unlike what I can easily do. It's a bit mind bending. For someone to be like “Oh yeah, that's 3 billion years ago and here was 4 billion”.

What if we could all expand our time frame to that level to have more of a literacy.

I feel like that's the problem: we’re time illiterate. We’re so focused on a three-generation human timespan that we can't solve problems outside of that. Even seven generations would be nice. But, you know, maybe a thousand would also be cool. 

But then again it's impossible not to get sucked into the news cycle. There's never a time when it's not totally traumatic and totally depressing and somebody's not grinding out somebody else's culture. And I'm not saying we should not pay attention. It's all urgent all the time. So, it's hard to pull back. I think it's easy to be accused of deflecting. It’s not about not honoring what's happening here and now. But if we only look here and now, we have blinders on.

B: I feel like you’re being strong about both Poles in the movie, there’s the dancing sequence in the end which feels really present compared to 4.5 billion years of history.

DS: That present moment, now, is infinite. And that's what keeps me going as an artist. It seems like it should be tiny and nonexistent, but actually it's infinitely huge, that present moment. I think if we can have that perspective, it has real political force because it gives you more space to think through the present moment and not feel demoralized and stuck. There are different ways to be present.

B: How do you translate this polytemporality into film, which is in itself a time-based medium?

DS: I make the film because I'm trying to process questions that I have. I'm not trying to answer them. I just want to get better at articulating them. And the film helps me do that. In terms of time, I'm not someone who thinks causally. I think about contingency, about ideas.

I'm an associative thinker. Maybe my film is more sculptural, prismatic, or just a net of ideas that are all influencing one another, but not going in one way.

Maybe you don't even remember what shot was next to what. But cumulatively there's a gathering of ideas that are brought together in a way that you find your path through. We make the film in the viewing. And that's what's so beautiful about it. I suppose you could say that about all art, but you can’t touch film. It's not there. And then it is. It only exists in our brains. And those ideas, the way you store them in your brain, can go any way.

Memory

B: Your film hinges on the idea that rocks and minerals carry a vast time-based memory. To what degree does the mediation of your editing process distort that memory for us as viewers?

DS: I hope that one doesn't feel the burden of those decisions. I mean, every single shot has a story behind it. So yes, I guess you could go through the film and ask: What's the etymology of this shot? I also wonder if somebody found the film 1000 years from now, what would they make out of it? Would they be able to see it and would there be a story? I think it's a good question to think about what forms of retelling or telling the present and past are going to work then. When language has only been around for a few thousand years what other forms of memory are there?

It's not like I was setting out with the film to find the ultimate form of commemoration, but it does seem like rocks have something to tell us in that regard. That is: Habits of form. The way they tend to grow. (Imitates a rock) “Oh, I am more like a polyhedron or a square or a tetrahedron.” It's a habit of matter that to me feels very much like rhythm, a spatial rhythm. Then again it might all just be due to the fact that we humans gravitate towards patterns. We look for them. That's our nature. So, for us, as a species, it makes sense as a memory tool.

However, I don't know what the owls will say about my history. It is a good question to ask though: What is story? Is it a kind of genetic way of ritualizing time? What are the ways we can ritualize time? Is it a sculptural pattern, an arrangement? Is it a melody? To me, that’s what I do as a filmmaker - ritualizing time. You make a little miniature ritual of time when you edit a film.

Specificity of Film

B: Does that count for other forms of storytelling as well or is that a specificity of film?

DS: Clearly a lot of people write scripts, but I try to let the film speak through film, to let the film express itself. I don't want to feel like I've drawn the outline, and the film is just there to color it in. I want to actually edit the film and through the editing, come up with a cinematic language. If you cannot describe a film in words but still understand it, then it works as cinema.

At least that’s the hope. Sure, it doesn't always work but I think it's good to have to try. As somebody who doesn't speak a lot of languages I can never be subtle or tell a joke in another language. With film it’s different. Here I can access those subtleties.

B: The film ends with a choir performing a seemingly deliberate ritual. What’s that about?

DS: The choir in the film stems from a tradition of singing called Shape Note singing. It's a very democratic form of choral singing where they all face one another and there's no conductor. They use squares, triangles and circles to write their notes, hence the name. They always first sing a version just of the sounds, not the words. Only then do they start singing the verses. The words are just the icing on top. It’s the in-between that matters. It's philosophy and it's mood and I just knew that I needed that in the film.

B: Why do you eventually return to such a ‘human’ structure?

DS: I think there is a shortage of interaction these days. Neither secularism nor consumerism are proper answers to that lack. I'm not advocating for organized religion to come back. We know people moved away from that for good reasons, but what is going to take its place? I don't know exactly, but singing, dancing or collective viewing in the cinema could be an idea. For me it is all about co-producing society in a way that makes spaces for what others have to say. 

Optimism

B: You mentioned that this film stands out within your filmography as rather optimistic. 

DS: It's true that I have made films like The Illinois Parables (2016) where certain political situations are more present which makes them in a (different) way heavy. Which does not mean that I think this film is light. I think there's beauty and there's melancholy in equal measure. Once you bracket the voice over narration you could just watch it and be like: “Oh my God, that's incredible. What is that?“ Then it’s more of a tourism through a microcosm – which is fantastic. It's a fantastic universe we live in. Every research I did was an introduction to a new microscopic world that amazed me. So, I think one could sort of subsume it on that level and just have it be like a stained-glass window or something. Nonetheless, once you include the voice overs, a certain daunting temporal vastness of rocky minerals bends human time as they both exceed and outlive us in incredible dimensions. We should try to learn from them.