A stag­ger­ing new film tells the sto­ry of faith in America

Con­dens­ing in excess of 1,300 years of his­to­ry into 60 min­utes of cin­e­ma seems like an impos­si­ble task – when assump­tions are made that his­to­ry should be rep­re­sent­ed lin­ear­ly and con­clu­sive­ly. Deb­o­rah Stratman’s The Illi­nois Para­bles, which includes ref­er­ence to events that took place from 600CE through to 1985, demon­strates an alter­na­tive method­ol­o­gy. Hers is one that demon­strates the prob­lems inher­ent to the cre­ation of his­tor­i­cal records – whether for­mal, infor­mal or acci­den­tal – as well as the expan­sive poten­tial of attempt­ing to write (and rewrite) them.

Arranged chrono­log­i­cal­ly, Strat­man splits the film’s eleven seg­ments defin­i­tive­ly with roman numer­als, cre­at­ing eleven rup­tures that accel­er­ates the film for­ward through time. A film built in the archives, The Illi­nois Para­bles is dense, research laden, method­i­cal and com­pli­cat­ed, yet put togeth­er with­out intend­ing to be a com­pre­hen­sive his­tor­i­cal sur­vey. These eleven vignettes, moments select­ed from mil­lions of pos­si­ble instances, are the sto­ries of Illi­nois that Strat­man con­sid­ers ​“canon­i­cal to [her]”.

What con­nects them is a focus some­how on land­scape – explor­ing wilder­ness­es, deserts and moun­tain­scapes; migra­tions or recla­ma­tions, force­ful and will­ing; era­sures, con­scrip­tions and delin­eations; and forms, lines and topolo­gies – ways in which humans have made some kind of inscrip­tion upon the land in which they pass through, and the traces that remain.

Strat­man says that this comes from her being ​“invest­ed in land­scape”, the film grow­ing from efforts to “[push] it to see what it offers”. Though hav­ing been in the works for over a decade, the film arrives at a very par­tic­u­lar present, a time of unease and uncer­tain­ty, where dis­parate peo­ples share a uni­fied, very real and press­ing con­cern for their col­lec­tive future. Stratman’s film, a kind of litur­gy for the land, feels like a con­scious attempt to look back. Unearthing his­to­ries bub­bling at the sur­face and buried deep­er, she uses a psy­cho­log­i­cal, rumi­na­tive restag­ing of var­i­ous pasts as a start­ing point from which to make sense of a broad­er present.

Born from an idea that 50 film­mak­ers each make a project about an Amer­i­can state, Stratman’s film cross­es the entire­ly of her state and its his­to­ry to show how both of those things are con­structs, begin­ning pre Illi­nois state and pre US set­tle­ment in Cahokia with the rem­nants of one of the ear­li­est Native Amer­i­can cities; and end­ing with the (re)staging of a recon­struc­tion in Chica­go, that of the police mur­der of Black Pan­ther Fred Hamp­ton. Then, with the cam­era bal­loon­ing upwards over the land­scape of Buf­fa­lo Rock in the film’s final seg­ment, Strat­man seems to sug­gest wher­ev­er we look, and no mat­ter how wide, we’ll only be see­ing one perspective.

In-between, Strat­man trans­ports view­ers to many sites of var­i­ous kinds of dis­as­ter, dis­place­ment or dis­or­der: to Gol­con­da, site of the ​‘trail of tears’, along which thou­sands of Chero­kees were forced off their land along in the 1830s; Gorham, struck by a fierce tor­na­do just over a hun­dred years lat­er; or Macomb, where a num­ber of homes caught dra­mat­i­cal­ly, inex­plic­a­bly alight twen­ty years after that. Strat­man says the human ten­den­cy is to ​“record and remem­ber the dra­mat­ic times”, that ​“vio­lence is what gets writ­ten down”, and her film con­tains ele­ments of this, haunt­ed by more than a few ghosts and con­tain­ing mul­ti­ple sequences of destruc­tive chaos, what she calls the human ​“attract[ion] to the cathar­sis of wip­ing clean”.

Cru­cial­ly though, while the film is imbued with the vio­lence of the ter­rain it tra­vers­es, it is not con­sumed by it. Adopt­ing 16mm for it’s gran­u­lar­i­ty and imme­di­a­cy, the invig­o­rat­ing pres­ence of that tex­ture of ​“the swarm” in the cel­lu­loid image and the enliven­ing hum of the pro­jec­tor spin­ning it to the room, Strat­man depicts some beau­ti­ful scenes – win­try, pic­turesque land­scapes of spoilt off-whites, dreamy blues, and earth­ly Mid­west­ern browns and greens.

The film’s assem­bly is sim­i­lar­ly mas­ter­ful, an endeav­our of will that shows the time spent piec­ing it all togeth­er. Strat­man employs cuts that snap, gen­er­at­ing pace or cre­at­ing space; sound bridges that make rhyth­mic jumps along­side excit­ing asso­cia­tive edits; musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ments that evoke a spe­cif­ic mood and time (‘Lunen­berg Trav­ellers’) or ones that abstract the visu­al mate­r­i­al from it’s peri­od occur­rence, offer­ing ​“melody as a nar­ra­tive” rather than an emo­tion­al cue (‘Les Porte-Men­taux’); vital, thought-pro­vok­ing quot­ed pas­sages, archive inclu­sions and news­pa­per cut­tings; and filmed imagery that is in turn evoca­tive, obfus­cat­ing and oblique.

Pre­sent­ing the film at the Essay Film Fes­ti­val, Strat­man spent as long a time as the film runs for talk­ing about it with the audi­ence after, much of which detailed the process of address­ing her ​“com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with didac­ti­cism”. She spoke of bal­anc­ing the con­sis­tent effort she’s made to ​“resist pre­scrip­tive polit­i­cal cin­e­ma” against the risk of ​“being so coy as to be obse­quious”, and of the impor­tance of space, of not explain­ing but allow­ing an audi­ence to feel their way around a film like this one, giv­ing them the ​“free­dom to contemplate”.

The Illi­nois Para­bles rewards repeat view­er­ship and flour­ish­es from its ambi­gu­i­ties, shun­ning absolutes and sug­gest­ing and inton­ing rather than telling. ​“If you get some­thing wrapped up, it’s a cir­cuit, it’s not con­ducive to con­ver­sa­tion.” ​“I make work because I don’t know, I like being in that place of unknow­ing. I think that is a pro­duc­tive place to be as a thinker”. Com­pelling and chal­leng­ing the view­er, Strat­man looks into modes of telling, explor­ing how nar­ra­tives are formed through expos­ing a cross sec­tion of sto­ries where place and past are inex­tri­ca­bly tied.