Reviews

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  ★★★★½ review by PatrickRipoll on Letterboxd

  In 16mm

  In my early 20's I worked as a merchandiser for a bread company. This job entailed waking up at 4 AM and driving around northwestern Illinois' various suburbs, hopping from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart before the sun came up, to make sure all the racks of bread were full and fresh before the customers arrived. It was eerie to drive down highways surrounded by endless empty fields, only to see the distant beckoning glow of the 24-hour superstore, rising like a temple out of the cold and sleepy Earth. This eeriness was only amplified by the experimental drone music and horror movie soundtracks I usually listened to in the wee hours of the morning.

  It felt wrong. It reminded me of when Burroughs talked about how old and evil the country was in Naked Lunch, like maybe destruction-for-profit has been the country's motto from the moment people started calling it a country.

  Enter The Illinois Parables. Like Der Todesking writ historic, with an eye to witnessing sites of actual human horrors that all exist within a five hour drive from my home, in the small towns and rural midwest landscapes of my adolescence. To say I'm the target audience for this is only incorrect in that I don't think Stratman consciously set out to make the horror film I so desired.

  What are the parables here? What are the eleven discreet lessons to be learned? I must admit my experimental film literacy is weak and I couldn't tell you. But what I did get was a clear sense of the United States (depicted here as the faceless force of evil that imposed it's shapes onto the country, dividing a landscape impartial to human suffering into discreet blocks of homes and agriculture) as an engine of death, forever fueled by the lives and resources deposed peoples.

  The film is not without it's hope and humor, it's warmth and empathy. It's not a cold and cynical thing. But as a piece of experimental horror, building dread out of the banality of nature, questioning the karmic connections between piles of dead Shawnee peoples and piles of dead tornado victims, it's impeccably paced and edited. But again, I don't know if Stratman knew she was tapping into a personal horror touchstone of mine. That's ok, though, because as an essay of temporal and geographical intersections, of unspoken connections and underseen stories of life, this is also a staggering work. A

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  ★★★½ review by Filipe Furtado on Letterboxd

  History emanating trough place. So concentrated. As far as Straubian materialistic histories of US goes, this is closer to Benning historical films (Deseret in particular comes to mind) than something in the manner of John Gianvito work even if it might at first seem closer to his larger canvas than Benning’s more focused one. There is a certain religious quality here, a sort of historical quest, than is established through editing that I didn’t expect to find. Stratman locates many notions of displacement and oppression in her histories, but she refuses to allow them to just move into each other. The film doesn’t treat history as stactic, but is also suspicious of the idea of progressive moment. Instead, the 11 parables presented are allowed to compete and collide with each other in manner that inform each other. As a foreigner, quite a few of Stratman’s can be obscure to me (I’m make multiple notes of “I need to research that”), I don’t know how different it plays to someone more acquitted with local history. Formally, there’s three central concepts, history, place and time, and the film is at best as illustration of the way histories reaches through time and the consistence of place.

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  ★★★½ review by Michael Sicinski on Letterboxd

  [7]

  A second viewing clarified for me just how crystal-clear this film is. It's rare to see any work - avant-garde, documentary, even fictional feature - with such a defined purpose. In fact, I think the first time I saw it I was a bit confused, because I expected there to be a bit more, something deeper and more resonant.

  But that's not the way all films need to operate, and Stratman's Parables treats the history of the state of Illinois not as an opportunity for mythmaking or even storytelling, but as a framework for a set of historical core samples. From first contact with the Native Americans up through the murder of Fred Hampton and onto the present day, each segment is relatively self-contained. Stratman labels each one with a Roman numeral, and they are concatenated like file folders in a particularly damning dossier.

  In her approach, Stratman makes work that is recognizably of a type. Her essay-films examine social and political histories through landscape, archival traces, and the evidence (often hidden in plain sight) that the world was once organized in radically different ways. Her films bear resemblance to those of James Benning, of course, but also John Gianvito, and as such The Illinois Parables is not afraid to open itself up, inviting in a polyphony of voices that do not necessarily resolve into a final meaning.

  After all, Stratman asks us to consider both the violent removal of the Cherokee, along the infamous "Trail of Tears," and the role that the people living near Nauvoo, IL, played in persecuting the LDS church, local law enforcement allowing a mob to murder Joseph Smith while incarcerated in nearby Carthage. It's unlikely even today that many Mormons would feel compelled to speak out against the murder of Fred Hampton, or vice versa. And "Indian Removal" is discussed in very different terms, depending on the textbook and the region.

  Point being, Stratman is not attempting to forge a single history of intersectional oppression. Rather, she is articulating a structural /geographical history - how a place is "settled," made safe for the dominant class - while logging objections along the way, from Emerson, Tocqueville, and others. In this way, Stratman emphasizes the fact that at all times, "Illinois" was a process, and it remains so. It is a political formation, defined by the decisions taken within its borders.

  The fact that Stratman chose to make The Parables during a period when our president was a former senator and community organizer from Illinois seems hardly coincidental.

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  ★★★★ review by Jaime Grijalba on Letterboxd

  The Illinois Parables (2016)

  8/10

  It's through details that we find identity. Great use of on-screen text.

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  ★★★★ review by Tessa Racked on Letterboxd

  I've lived in Chicago for almost 4 years, but I've not yet ventured more than one county outside the city within the state. I'm starting to feel like a Chicagoan, but definitely not an Illinoisan. In that sense, I felt removed from this film, ironic considering that exodus is a recurring theme. The rural areas I am familiar with are in the mid Atlantic region, so a lot of the locations felt strange and uncanny (eg. the birdsong felt off). The film reminded me of Weird NJ, which I would buy and read periodically when I lived there, as both are projects dedicated to preserving local history and prioritize the accounts of regular folk as much (if not more than) official plaques. If nothing else, it was a lesson for me that I'm not living on an island in the middle of a void peppered by Walmarts.

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