School of Film

Deborah Stratman

Editing room with multiple monitors and mixing board

Camera-Edit-Sound

A Discussion with Deborah Stratman

Monday, October 26th
12:00 - 2:00 PM PST

Join Professor Ben Mendelsohn's Film 131: Film Analysis class for a virtual screening and discussion about film sound with artist Deborah Stratman!

Inquiries: bam34@pdx.edu

Ray's Birds (7 min, 16mm, 2010)
Ray Lowden keeps seventy-two large birds of prey, five deer and some wallabies at his place in Northumberland. The film is a little homage to his variously coy, imperious, curious, stubborn and comic raptor menagerie.

Immortal, Suspended (6 min, HD video, 2013)
The idea of suspension is evoked on shifting registers – as levitation, cessation, preservation, and suspense – and located in sites whose identities slip as we track through a space within a space.

Hacked Circuit (15 min, HD video, 2014)
A single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. The scene being foleyed is the final sequence from The Conversation, where Gene Hackman's character Harry Caul tears apart his room searching for a ‘bug’ that he suspects has been covertly planted. 

Optimism (15 min, Super 8 film, 2018)
Cancan dancers, curlers, ore smelters, former city officials and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot on location in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.


Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that investigate power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, mineral evolution, sisterhood and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), MCA (Chicago), Whitney Biennial (NY) and has done site-specific projects with venues including the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Hallwalls, Mercer Union and Ballroom Marfa. Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom. She 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, Harpo Foundation and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.