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.

Quote:
Perhaps one of Ben Russell’s most improvised and (indirectly) personal films. This hallucinatory short film consists of material shot in Finland, Greece, Belarus, Romania, Lithuania and Marseille. It is divided into two parts: one blue – which is more in the style of a documentary, but very abstract and with fragmented editing – and the other red. The very core of the red part is built on long flashing sequences, which work as a meditation on the relationship between memory, time and repression.

Against.Time.2022.1080p.WEB.AAC.2.0.h264-SaL.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	22 min 56 s
Size: 	517 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1038 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.063
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 160 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A21CB767E9CADBA/Against.Time.2022.1080p.WEB.AAC.2.0.h264-SaL.mkv

Language(s):No linguistic content
Subtitles:None

The post Ben Russell – Against Time (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

23MB | 3m 42s | 640×472 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6C9B4B0765043F6/Rock_Me_Amadeus_by_Falco_Via_Kardinal_by_Otto_Muehl.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English hard coded

The post Ben Russell – Rock Me Amadeus by Falco Via Kardinal by Otto Muehl (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

Director’s note :
Beginning with a 600-meter descent into the depths of the earth, Good Luck shines a flashlight onto the human face of labor in the time-warp’d working conditions of an underground state-owned mine in Serbia. The hiss of oxygen cuts through the diesel rumble, the walls of the office vibrate with explosions two levels below; war-torn and half-forgotten, these miners’ physical struggle finds its mirror a continent away – in the tropical heat of an illegal Surinamese gold mine.

The water pumps roar under the blinding sun; silver liquid rolls across the hand of a Saramaccan Maroon as he adds mercury to dirt in a never-ending search for gold. Formed between dark and light, cold and heat, North and South, Good Luck immerses its viewer in the precarious natural and social environments of two distinct labor groups so as to better understand the bonds that men share. Here is the human foundation of capital, revealed.

From the outset, it felt too easy to critique a process that all of us are directly implicated in, to have a public opinion about the horrors and environmental destruction that are part and parcel of the mining process – be it legal or illegal. It ultimately wasn’t the process that interested me as much as the side effects of the process: the community that arises out of harsh conditions, the collective that manifests out of necessity. I spent months in these mines simply because I wanted to better understand how men persevere.

Ben Russell

Awards
Best Experimental Film @National Society of Film Critics Awards 2017
Wavelengths Program @TorontoIFF 2017
International Competition @Locarno 2017

http://nitroflare.com/view/F18BEF5DAF78BC9/Good_Luck%2C_2017.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/6FBB2E59FB8DA5D/Good_Luck,_2017.srt

Language(s):Saramaccan, Serbian
Subtitles:French (Hardcoded), English

The post Ben Russell – Good Luck (2017) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

http://nitroflare.com/view/0A55960D4336B7C/A_Spell_to_Ward_Off_the_Darkness.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Ben Rivers & Ben Russell – A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

http://nitroflare.com/view/C2C994CC9726112/GREETINGS_TO_THE_ANCESTORS_%28Ben_Russell%2C_2014%29.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Ben Russell – Greetings to the Ancestors (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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, Artforum

https://nitro.download/view/D7A4FCCB9CE387B/ATLANTIS_(Ben_Russell,_2014).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:english

The post Ben Russell – ATLANTIS (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

Shot almost entirely with a 16mm Steadicam rig in thirteen extended shots of nearly ten minutes each, Let Each One Go Where He May is strangely taut as it absorbs the rhythms and sounds of life, landscape and legacy. The camera acts as a third character, observing but also engaging in a deft dance with the two young men, following one then the other, circling, pursuing, leading, pausing, with sometimes disarming intimacy. Uncomfortably assuming its role as documenter, this disembodied, alternating point of view trails the film’s protagonists along dirt paths, onto a crammed, bobbing bus, through illegal gold mines and urban traffic, into the jungle and onto a motorboat, at last stumbling upon a rousing, ritualistic scene where the real ultimately challenges the film’s fiction.

In its cartographic portrayal of contemporary Saramaccan culture, Let Each One Go Where He May invites anachronism and myth-making to participate in the film’s daring conflation of history, its oscillations between re-enactment and record, its investigation of the gaze and cultural oppression and survival. Like a Rouchian ethno-fiction, the film leads the viewer not only on an extraordinary quest, but also into an inquiry on representation and the camera’s transformative powers.

Andréa Picard

https://nitro.download/view/3A27B9874416796/Let_Each_One_Go_Where_He_May_(Ben_Russell,_2009).avi

Language:Saramaccan
Subtitles:none (dialogue rare and unimportant)

The post Ben Russell – Let Each One Go Where He May (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.