Deborah Stratman: Last Things

In these two works by Deborah Stratman, the filmmaker collapses boundaries between the historical and the political, the modern and the primordial.

Vever (for Barbara)
USA 2019
16mm overført til HD
12min

The film grew out of abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and passed through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti. A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.

Last Things 
USA/Portugal/France/Jordan
35mm
50min

A virtuosic and experimental ode to the mineral kingdom – via early French sci-fi, microscopic footage and polyphonic song.

Set to a propulsive soundtrack of alien blips by Brian Eno and Okkyung Lee, Last Things tells a 13-billion-year-old story of mineral evolution. Iridescent crystals spin and exquisite fractal patterns bloom. The camera zooms out to lunar landscapes and in on microscopic particles glimmering like stained glass.

An eerily exquisite film about our planet carved out of science and speculation, poetry and geology, unfolding with remarkable images where the geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures