Ben Russell
"Against Time" is a visual journey, continuing Ben Russell’s investigations into the perception of time and how we listen to music.
"La Montagne Invisible" is an installation conceived as a journey into the infinite : an immersive multi-channel AV installation that transforms the material of a Finnish wanderer's secular pilgrimage towards a utopian summit into an infinite video labyrinth of beginnings, endings and disjunctive in-betweens.
A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial legacy of a post-postcolonial present.
Shot in a creaky, wooden-floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of “Resistance”, the film initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round.
Through softly textured 16mm photography and regional iconography, Silva offers a modernist reflection on two of upstate New York’s most storied 19th century touchstones—the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the legend of Rip Van Winkle—nodding to a few musical heroes along the way.
This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film's central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into a single landscape.
A speculative portrait of a Dutchman living in the Surinamese jungle - fixing canoe motors, accused of eating the locals' children.
“Filmed in the remains of Soweto’s historic Sans Souci Cinema (1948-1998), YOLO is a makeshift structuralist mash-up created in collaboration with the Eat My Dust youth collective from the Kliptown district of Soweto, South Africa. Vibrating with mic checks and sine waves, resonating with an array of pre-roll sound—this is cause and effect shattered again and again, temporarily undone. O humanity, You Only Live Once!”—Ben Russell
'Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand.' (Ben Russell)
A transfixing performance film in which artist Basma Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the "post-civilization" of the Gaza Strip while under self-hypnosis.
On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.
A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.
A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces - of grafitti'd marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls - hand-processed in red, green, and blue.
“I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.” -- Ponce de Léon Our PONCE DE LEÓN discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he became old forever – an 80-year old Spaniard who would continue to walk the earth for century after century after century, watching as coral foundations gave way to mangrove swamps, as swamps were drained and buildings were erected, as buildings decayed and swamps returned. Our PONCE DE LEÓN is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma – it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de Léon, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself.
Trance dance and water implosion, a line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Shot in a single-take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of an animist are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps, embodiment is our eternal everything.
BEAST, described in numerous circles as a “three-piece percussive drone/noise force, complete with two drummers and skull-based strobe-electronics” is comprised of three 6’ 2”+ artist/ musicians Thad Kellstadt, Tim Nickodemus and Ben Russell. Members’ projects have been viewed at La Casa Encendida (Madrid), the Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival (Netherlands), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Epileptic eyes! Heart attack ears! BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST
"TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell's unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence." - Michael Green, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It’s Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set.
(3:00, video, color, sound, 2009) A closely hewn remake of the first half of Viennese Actionist (and convicted sex offender) Otto Muehl's 1967 film Kardinal with the following minor substitutions: the original woman is played by the artist, the original artist is played by a woman wearing a powdered wig, and the film is presented as a Karaoke sing-a-long to a tune by one of Otto Muehl's more effete 80's popstar countrymen.
The film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, in a rehearsal of the voyage undertaken by their ancestors, who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior. A path still traveled to this day, its changing topography bespeaks a diverse history of forced migration.
An experimental ethnography recorded in the jungle village of Bendekondre, Suriname at the start of 2007. Composed of community-generated performances, re-enactments and extemporaneous recordings, this film functions doubly as an examination of a rapidly changing material culture in the present and as a historical document for the future. Whether the resultant record is directed towards its subjects, its temporary residents (filmmakers), or its Western viewers is a question proposed via the combination of long takes, materialist approaches, selective subtitling, and a focus on various forms of cultural labor.
A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism.
Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible racial stereotypes.
115 years later, a(nother) remake of the Lumiere Brothers pseudo-actuality film La Sortie des usines Lumière. This time around our factory is a job site, a construction site peopled by thousands of Southeast Asian laborers, a neo-Fordist architectural production site that manufactures skyscrapers like so many cars.
The third part in a series of films dealing with naturally-derived psychedelia. Shot during a performance by Rhode Island noise band Lightning Bolt, this film documents the transformation of a rock audience’s collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.
A giant pot is ascending from the sky. Twenty winsome damsels are landing on planet earth, coming out of the pot filled with two-hundred and eighty pounds of spaghetti. A battle for sauce and survival ensues.
"A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap. These simple elements create a hurried maze of twisting antler branches, twigs, and dissected slices of pure “space.” I can hear the crackling fires, echoing elk calls and frosty despair…" - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition
"A night sky fills with light shimmers and flecks, surface markings, heavenly bodies. It’s an ocean, a well, a screen, a mirror, a portal. Blackness/void cluttered by growing ephemera. Dark reaches of outer and inner space gradually sifts through shards of granite and diamonds. The mind races as the material becomes greater and more frenetic, reaching a nearly audibly grinding pitch of excitement, flurry, and instantaneous infinity that ebbs at first and then maintains. Flashes of color emerge or are imagined. Chaotic flickering of dancing peasant girls and violently twisting astronaut helmets. Layers of sea slime over undulating life forms. Bonfires and celebration. Explosions, construction. Holocausts. Primordial ooze, modern civilization. Ages and seconds. Floating heads circle kaleidoscopic bursts of shiny beads. Everything everywhere twists, forces through, transforms into, overlaps everything else." - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition (TIE)
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.
An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods.
From the south of France, a science fiction film about the end of the Leisure Class and that which came to replace it.
“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas
the quarry is a silent document of five minutes in the presence of the sublime. This small, quiet 16mm film serves as a testament both to cinema’s failure to reproduce the lived moment and to its success in replacing that moment with one that is equally wondrous.
In the blue-green light of the tropical rainforest, among the creeks and boulders and fallen trees, humankind's closest relatives drift in and out of meditative states. Also features a hippo and a tapir.
Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.
The Breathers-In is a 16mm experimental narrative film in which two Victorian Sisters float through a post-industrial landscape of Loss and Alienation. Through the use of archetypal characters, silent-film aesthetics, and asynchronous sound, The Breathers-In produces a world in which established constructs of identity, race, and narrative itself are slowly splintered apart.
Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.
An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.
Featuring a soundtrack melted out of a Cyndi Lauper CD, here is an(other) attempt to find a way through the everywhere fog of 2020. Filmed between 2019's Carpathian Mountains, Vilnius punk clubs and Belarusian Independence Day celebrations. This is an overgrown path, a ghost-poem, a companion piece to Jonathan Schwartz's FOR THEM ENDING (2006) – and a memorial for Jonathan, completed two years after his death.
