O'er the Land (2009, Deborah Stratman) + November (2004, Hito Steyerl)
Monday 30th of June, 6:45pm in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema
Join us on Monday 30th of June from 6:45pm (films start at 7pm) for a rescheduled screening of a pair of experimental documentaries: Deborah Stratman’s O’er the Land (2009) and Hito Steyerl’s November (2006). The first film is 52 minutes and the second is 25 minutes so the program as a whole will take a total of 77 minutes, with the screening ending at around 8:30 pm.
O’er the Land and November are films about what it means to be changed in the 21st century by technology and its relationship to political and social struggle without diagnosing a problem or defining a meaning to a story. They both deal with the experience of a collapse of time and space which audiovisual technology can cause, and with what resistance and agency are enabled by images, their trajectories and their power to suspend the self. By screening these films together, the idea is to offer an encounter with the functions of the documentary and essay forms when they are deconstructed or expanded. Additionally, to confront ideas about the ownership of images, militarized culture, and the textures and affects of history, all the while abstracting discourse.
Stratman is a Chicago-based filmmaker and artist who engages in non-prescriptive, materialist documentaries which gather ideas and problems rather than telling a linear story, often preoccupied with physically locating systems of control and freedom. O’er the Land is a critical approach to a landscape film about what it means to be American and how a national psyche may enclose destiny. The film shifts along a variety of landscapes, either literal ones or those revealed in the slowed down details of national spectacles and ideology. The landscapes force us into a dialogue with violent infrastructure and technology. The way the image is treated in the film is almost a threat to our reliance on it, as well as where identification is made frightening. In her own words, Stratman says:
this film is concerned with the sudden, simple, thorough ways that events can separate us from the system of things, and place us in a kind of limbo. Like when we fall. Or cross a border. Or get shot. Or saved. The film forces together culturally acceptable icons of heroic national tradition with the suggestion of unacceptable historical consequences, so that seemingly benign locations become zones of moral angst.
Throughout her career, the German writer and artist Hito Steyerl has affirmed the confessional, illuminating potential of images, despite her substantial skepticism about whether we are really seeing. As she says in a recent article, “all it takes is to remove the noise of reality from my photos and extract the social signal instead”.
November is one of Steyerl’s earliest films, where she juxtaposes images of her best friend Andrea Wolf playing a leather-clad warrior on a motorcycle for an unfinished amateur exploitation film made when they were teenagers against her participation in revolutionary struggle for the PKK years later through which she was killed and made into a media martyr.
In the film, Steyerl is in the process of discovering how to reconcile being turned into a media image and its production of myths, an event that can be ultimately renegotiated for emancipation, or spiritual survival, despite being continuously haunting. In this way, both Stratman and Steyerl are making sense of an escalation of inescapable digital mediation and the role of technological interferences to our embodied self, a concern relevant today.
In an article for Interventions Journal, Pernille Lystlund Matzen writes on November:
the film positions itself in an ideologically precarious space in which clear demarcations of revolutionary struggle have been blurred—a space where the distinction between hero and villain appears arbitrary and the political subject can no longer be constructed without complication. How do we maneuver in a state of uncertain truths and corruptible imagery? How can we imagine aesthetic and political resistance through documentary film, when political action seems either reduced to empty gestures or turned into local, peripheral struggles, and when it is only the gestures and images of liberation that keep circulating?… the film portrays a precarious political reality where documents are fictionalized, just as fictions, to some extent, become documents.As the film illustrates by tracing traveling images and gestures, this conflation between document and fiction is intensified by the advent of our global informational-present, where new technology and digital recording make images increasingly easy to circulate, mold and post-produce. However, November is less invested in problematizing these increasingly blurred boundaries between reality and fiction than taking these entanglements as a premise to rework through documentary. The underlying question seems to be: How can documentary still lay claim to some sense of historicity and social integrity in the relativization of politics and truth?