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The Paranormal Trilogy

Deborah Stratman

2007 00:10:20 United StatesEnglishB&W and ColorStereo4:3Video

Description

2005-2007 What is explained can be denied, but what is felt can't be forgotten. -- Charles Bowden Ghost: the outward and visible sign of an inward fear. -- Ambrose Bierce

How Among the Frozen Words She Found Some Odd Ones 2005, 0:44 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 could be released upon the breaking or melting of the frozen forms.

It Will Die Out In The Mind 2006, 3:50 A short inquisition of science by the paranormal. On-screen texts are lifted from Tarkovsky's film "Stalker" in which something more expansive and less explicable than logic or technology is offered as the conceptual pillar of the human spirit. The title is taken from a passage in Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed" about time after the Apocalpyse: "Kirillov: When the whole of man has achieved happiness, there won't be any time, because it won't be needed. It's perfectly true. Stavrogin: Where will they put it then? Kirillov: They won't put it anywhere. Time isn't a thing, it's an idea. It will die out in the mind."

The Magician's House 2007, 5:45 Both a letter to a cancer stricken, alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, "The Magician's House" is full of ghosts. Including that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the Magic Lantern or "Sorcerer’s Lamp". The music, La lutte des Mages (The Struggle of the Magicians), was composed by Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Gurdjieff thought of man as a kind of "transmitting station of forces." To him, most people move around in a state of waking sleep, so he sought to provide aural conditions that would induce awareness.

About Deborah Stratman

Filmmaker Deborah Stratman works in a territory between experimental and documentary genres.  In her films and frequent work in other media, including drawing, sculpture, sound, photography and small press, she explores the history, uses, mythologies and control of highly varied landscapes, from Muslim Xinjiang China to suburban southern California. Her recent work addresses American constructs of Freedom, the junction between technology and faith and contemporary locations of the supernatural. Stratman teaches in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Stratman was the subject of a mid-career retrospective,The Thing Unnamed, at MoMA New York in 2013.