Survey of the Landscape is the first of a series of screenings focused on the landscape film The conversation begins with Larry Gottheim's meditative "Fog Line" and continues with Deborah Stratman's "From Hettie To Nancy," a fascinating work that blends documentary and experimental film.
Sunday, October 18 at 8pm.
$5
Lof/t
Larry Gottheim's "Fog Line" (1970)
“One stares, one stares, and the fog begins to lift, the exquisite image reveals itself. The three patchy trees, the landscape lines, the tension lines, the moving ghost animals, the moving emulsion swirls, all impress themselves on consciousness, are consciousness. Still, rigid lines attempt to contain the amorphous elusive moving fog. Line nature competes with fog nature, but all is harmony, bathed in gorgeous paleness.” - Larry Gottheim
From the late-1960s series "single-shot" films to the dense sound/image constructs of the mid-1970s and after, his cinema is the cinema of presence, of observation, and of deep conscious engagement. While addressing genres of landscape, diary and assemblage filmmaking, Gottheim's work properly stands alone in its intensive investigations of the direct, sensual experience in collision with complex structure of repetition, anticipation and memory. (REDCAT)
Deborah Stratman's "From Hetty to Nancy" (1997)
"The stoic beauty of the Icelandic landscape forms a backdrop for a series of witty and caustic letters written at the turn of the century by a woman named Hetty as she treks with her companion Masie, four school girls and their school marm. The film juxtaposes Hetty's ironic cataloguing of the petty social interactions as they endure discomfort and boredom with historic accounts of catastrophes that reveal the Icelandic people subject to the awesome forces of nature." - Deborah Stratman
Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Her films, rather than telling stories, pose a series of problems - and through their at times ambiguous nature, allow for a complicated reading of the questions being asked. Many of her films point to the relationship between physical enviroments and the very human struggles for power, ownership, mastery and control that are played out on the land. (pythagorasfilm.com)
