from “Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror)

“Bright Lights Film Journal”, issue No. 51

By Gary Morris

The work of Deborah Stratman is distinguished by its variety — few filmmakers attach their names to both distinctly experimental and documentary work — and its fascinating formalism. The DVD Something Like Flying offers a glimpse at an unusual career via three of her most important works.

Kings of the Sky (2004, 68 mins.) is recognizably in the ethnographic tradition, documenting a little-known subculture through nominal biography of one of its celebrities. The subculture is a Turkic Muslim society, the Uyghurs, located in China's largest, westernmost province Xinjiang. The celebrity is the charismatic Adil Dawaz, a Guinness World Record winner for his extraordinary tightrope walking, a vocation that stretches back through his family over 400 years. Stratman followed Adil's troupe with her camera through the province's village oases over a four-month period, documenting their colorful, dangerous performances. (Adil recounts a fall that left him with 17 broken bones, but he's also shown walking a tightrope over a deep canyon, so high up that he disappears into clouds for part of the walk.) But along the way, other dramas unfold, taking the film beyond individual biography to confront larger issues. One of these is the conflict between the separatist-minded Uyghurs, who've routinely been harassed, incarcerated, even executed for their attempts at sovereignty, and the dominant Han Chinese who want to ensure control. In one vivid scene, police harass a crowd of ethnic Uyghurs with large tree branches. Woven throughout the journey are the small details that comprise a rich culture. The troupe's gorgeous costumes, their struggle to erect a vast tent against the desert's blinding winds, the dazzling variety of sights in the marketplace — all contribute to a finely etched portrait of a man whose literal balancing act reflects a larger one that a whole society is engaged in.

In Order Not to Be Here (2002, 33 mins.) opens with ultra-grainy surveillance footage, with a helicopter's eye-view of what appears to be a police action involving dogs and a fugitive. This sequence sets the stage for a cutting exploration of the dark side of the modern American mindset. Much of what follows is a series of tableaux mordant documenting a Hopper-esque America at night — eerie shots of barricade-like fences and walls, some with the faux-fancy names ("Ashbury") that mark the modern haute housing development, others with low lights that illuminate them against an encroaching, threatening darkness. In this world, fast-food drive-ups are empty but the signage is friendly, and lonely ATMs blink repeated invitations of "Welcome," a cold robotic communication that substitutes for reassuring human communication. Even the interiors have the sterile feel of a Kubrick set — a perfectly positioned armchair in a room that looks like a window display, a cookbook opened to a recipe in a pristine, empty kitchen. Stratman punctuates these images of a world without humanity or human beings with creepy electronic music and ambient sounds of ominously barking dogs and wailing police sirens. The second half of the film expands on the alienation/paranoia theme, again returning to the godlike viewpoint of a helicopter relentlessly pursuing a "suspect" running through a grainy landscape. The image is a negative to the earlier shots' positive, as fuzzy as those scenes of abandoned urbanscapes were sharp, with the mysterious fugitive running through fields and forests and finally into a river that becomes a kind of maelstrom/vortex that swallows him whole — the fate that awaits, it seems, humankind in an increasingly "civilized" world.

Stratman's travels have taken her across the globe (most recently to a long stint in Laos). From Hetty to Nancy (1997, 45 mins.) is set in remote Iceland. This landscape film counterpoints majestic shots of rugged mountains, raging oceans, and other natural imagery with two texts: one a series of historical accounts that appear on screen describing various catastrophes — pirate attacks, enslavement, shipwrecks — the other a voiceover from a series of letters from the 1930s in which two young women exchange droll and bitchy insights into their trip to Iceland. The women emerge as hilariously overcivilized as they laugh at and complain about their schoolgirl charges and the conditions of travel. They carp that their "tent was closing in on us like something out of Edgar Allan Poe." They wittily invoke Mother Britain: "To see Maisie struggling out of her undies in two square feet of space makes you realize what built the Empire." The great gulf between such talk, however entertaining, and the vast, destructive power of the natural forces at work here challenges both human arrogance and the supposed benefits of civilized society — a challenge that drives some of Stratman's other work.