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.

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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.

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.