Join us at the October screening for Mills Folly Microcinema, the monthly showcase of experimental film and video presented by Arts + Literature Laboratory.
Mills Folly Microcinema will screen The Illinois Parables (2016, digital video, 60 minutes), an experimental documentary by Chicago-based filmmaker Deborah Stratman, on Thursday, October 25 at 7:30 p.m. Admission will be $5, or free for Arts + Literature Laboratory members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 7:15 p.m.
The Illinois Parables: a suite of Midwestern parables that question the historical role belief has played in ideology and national identity; an experimental documentary comprised of regional vignettes about faith, force, technology and exodus. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism and resistance, all occurring somewhere in the state of Illinois. The state is a convenient structural ruse, allowing its histories to become allegories that explore how we’re shaped by conviction and ideology.
The film suggests links between technological and religious abstraction, placing them in conversation with governance. Locations are those where the boundaries between the rational and supernatural are tenuous. They are “thin places” where the distance between heaven and earth has collapsed, or more secularly, any place that bears a heavy past, where desire and displacement have lead us into or erased us from the land. What began as a consideration of religious freedom eventually led to sites where belief or invention triggered expulsion. The film utilizes reenactment, archival footage, observational shooting, inter-titles and voiceover to tell its stories and is an extension of previous works in which the director questioned foundational American tenants. More information at Stratman's website, pythagorasfilm.com.
About the filmmaker: Deborah Stratman is an artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and human struggles for power and control that play out on the land. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, exodus and faith. Stratman is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois / UIC.
Critical praise for The Illinois Parables:
“I’ve seen Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables only once, but I’m eager to see it again. A dense weave of found and original sights and sounds, this hourlong film is at once an experimental documentary, a work of historical excavation and an insistently moral ideological critique.” —Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“[Stratman] establishes a hypnotic, rhythmic flow in the assembly of her material that draw the viewer ever deeper in, mixing aerial and wide shots, archival footage, historical documents. . .The result is one of the most striking examples of documentary filmmaking you’re likely to see anywhere this year.” —Kieron Corless, Sight & Sound
“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.” —Nick Pinkerton, Film Comment
Festivals and Awards:
World Premiere: Sundance, January 2016
European Premiere: Berlinale, February 2016
Douglas Edwards Independent/Experimental Film/Video Prize – 42nd LA Film Critics Association Awards
The Stan Brakhage award at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema is programmed by James Kreul from Madison Film Forum. Mills Folly Microcinema will showcase nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We will also network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we will incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at open shows (the video equivalent of an open mic).
Mills Folly Microcinema is funded in part by a grant from the Madison Arts Commission, with additional funds from the Wisconsin Arts Board.
