Ben Russell

  • Ben Russell – Against Time (2022)

    2021-2030Ben RussellExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Ben Russell explores how we experience time in his latest striking and hallucinatory short film. Between Carpathian Mountains, Vilnius punk clubs, a Belarusian Independence Day celebration, and Marseille, hovers in a limbo of drone and fog, then descends into stroboscopic clusters of moments and movements.Read More »

  • Ben Russell – Rock Me Amadeus by Falco Via Kardinal by Otto Muehl (2009)

    Ben Russell2001-2010ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    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.Read More »

  • Ben Russell – Good Luck (2017)

    2011-2020Ben RussellDocumentaryFrance

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    Filmed between a state-owned large-scale underground mine in the war-torn state of Serbia and an illegal mining collective in the tropical heat of Suriname, Good Luck is a visceral non-fiction portrait of hope and sacrifice in a time of global economic turmoil.

    SYNOPSIS
    Shot on Super16mm, Good Luck is a portrait of two mining communities operating on opposite sides of a hostile world: the state employees of a 600m-deep underground Serbian copper mine and the Maroon laborers of an illegal gold mining operation in the jungle tropics of Suriname.Read More »

  • Ben Rivers & Ben Russell – A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013)

    Ben RiversBen Rivers and Ben RussellBen RussellDocumentaryExperimentalFrance

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    Synopsis:
    A Spell follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black met al band in Norway.

    Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort, A Spell is a radical proposition for the existence of utopia in the present.

    Starring musician Robert AA Lowe (best known for his intense live performances under the name Lichens) in the lead role, A Spell lies somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – it is at once a document of experience and an experience itself, an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.
    Read More »

  • Ben Russell – Greetings to the Ancestors (2015)

    2011-2020Ben RussellDocumentaryExperimentalUSA

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    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.Read More »

  • Ben Russell – ATLANTIS (2014)

    2011-2020Ben RussellExperimentalMaltaPolitics

    We Utopians are happy / This will last forever”

    Loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, Atlantis is a documentary portrait of Utopia — an island that has never / forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet. Herein is folk song and pagan rite, religious march and reflected temple, the sea that surrounds us all. Even though we are slowly sinking, we are happy and content.

    “Atlantis interrogates this space of fabulation without ever leaving the real island behind, finding itself caught between a portrait of place and the conjuring of a drowned paradise.”

    –Erika Balsom, ArtforumRead More »

  • Ben Russell – Let Each One Go Where He May (2009)

    2001-2010Ben RussellDocumentaryEthnographic CinemaExperimentalUSA

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    Let Each One Go Where He May
    Ben Russell
    2009
    2hr. 13min.

    Chicago-based filmmaker Ben Russell has gone international with Trypps – a series of short, mesmerizing films loosely interpreting the notion of “trip,” from literal, geographic journeys to ecstatic music-induced highs, variations of trance and spasmodic filmic episodes. Along with Tjüba Tën/The Wet Season (co-directed by Brigid McCaffrey), his medium-length experimental documentary shot in Suriname, and his live projector performances, Russell’s body of work displays an ever-increasing interest in cinematic anthropologies.

    Let Each One Go Where He May is Russell’s stunning feature debut, a film that both partakes in and dismantles traditional ethnography, opts for mystery and natural beauty over annotation and artifice, and employs unconventional storytelling as a means toward historical remembrance. A rigorous, exquisite work with a structure at once defined and winding, 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 earlier. The path is still travelled to this day and its changing topography bespeaks a diverse history of forced migration.Read More »

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