"And then there is Deborah Stratman’s tribute to Erich von Stroheim a century after Greed (1924). What to even call this text? Is it a letter? A voiceover narration? Prose poem? Whatever, it burns a hole clean through the layers of history, fiction, landscape, and the mad folly of filmmaking. Stratman inhabits and expands the space of Greed, contemplating its ruins like some kino-eyed Angel of History. After reading this text, we may be forgiven for thinking that von Stroheim is surely now as much influenced by Stratman as she by him. ‘Tradition,’ wrote the poet Jack Spicer, ‘means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation – but, of course, never really losing anything […] Things do not connect; they correspond,’ he explains to [Frederico García] Lorca. 'That tree you saw in Spain is a tree I could never have seen in California, that lemon has a different smell and a different taste, BUT the answer is this – every place and every time has a real object to correspond with your real object.' The task is not to imagine Lorca’s lemon – or for that matter, von Stroheim’s desert – but rather to discover it here and now."
Max Goldberg to Garbiña Ortega in Cartas como películas / Letters as Films, pub. by Punto de Vista-La Fábrica, 2021
