In Order Not To Be Here - Deborah Stratman, 2002
Punctum 75
"In an interview a few years ago, experimental filmmaker Deborah Stratman listed Barbara Loden and Jon Jost among her key influences, and the impact of both of these diffident figures, icons in an increasingly evanescent hardcore avant-garde filmmaking tradition, is evident in Stratman’s latest film. The 33-minute In Order Not To Be Here (2002) continues her forbears’ tendency to bring cheerfully enigmatic formal verve to their scornful disdain of American hypocrisy. Stratman’s film employs the codes of surveillance footage – black-and-white images shot from a helicopter at night, for example – to question notions of personal safety next to the frightening facts of an increasingly omniscient, panoptic government.”
- Holly Willis, LA Weekly
"...an exercise in Warholian unease with a succession of lingering bad-dream views of gated suburban communities and anonymous figures tracked by surveillance cameras. With its restless movement across nighttime lawns and its omniscient views from above, the film generates an anxious tension that is never resolved. It feels like a slasher film without the slasher, a news report of a disaster still to come."
- Holland Cotter, The New York Times, 2003