SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2009: O'ER THE LAND

The radical right and ridiculous reasons to explode things in O'er the Land.

Other narratives

By John Esther

The January 23 public screening of Deborah Stratman's O'er the Land had more early departures than any other film I attended at Sundance Film Festival 2009. Since this was a New Froniter's selection described in the Sundance program book as "Straman's mediation of freedom and technological approaches to manifest destiny," what were filmgoers expecting? A story about a very annoying nerd with a cool name? U2 in 3D?

Using images of outsiders doing the strangest and, sometimes noisiest, of jobs (putting out fires in the middle of monstrous factories; or putting out fires in seemingly nowhere), Colonel William Rankin recounting his 40-minute fall from the sky after ejecting a plane (holy hell, what an anecdote) while clouds and noise roll up, and Americans getting off on senseless destruction/those watching others getting off on senseless destruction (machine gun rentals, fire-gun "painting" -- see the bright, shiny things, America)with lingering lucid precision, Stratman draws attention to the narratives of these people or ontologies one rarely notices in the reel or real life. Images are all around us yet few of them are ever recognized. Upon closer inspection they say a lot more about the human condition, the American one in particular, than the dominant paradigms of discourse.

While Stratman is a little bit too obsessed with the, sometimes, banal order of things for my tastes, her lingering images are refreshing language alternatives to macro and micro mediums of expression. Independence.