The Illinois Parables

Faithful to the title of her film, Deborah Stratman sets up an allegorical and meditative field by narrating shorts stories set in the State of Illinois between the year 600 – namely far before the ‘birth of the nation’ –and 1985. This crossing over history occurs by way of the trace (or its absence) in the landscape, but also through archival images. The film further incorporates headings that reference the “Newsreel” which the writer Dos Passos had included in his USA trilogy (1938). The Illinois Parables is precise, sensitive, and generous. It organises visual, aural, and musical matter to narrate a fragment of the great American novel, in which ideals and violence, purity and sin seem condemned to cohabitate.  (Arnaud Hée)