Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ben Russell is a Chicago-based filmmaker, artist, art instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
curator, and a great keynote speaker. Perhaps he may be considered a terminologist, for he seemingly
has coined the term/genre psychedelic ethnography, judging by his writings and recent inspiring
lecture at the MCA.
Mr. Russells recent three-hour ethnography Let Each One Go Where He May (2009) won a FIPRESCI
award at the 2010 International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is a pioneering film in the ethnographic
sphere of cinema: an experimental ethnographic film shot almost entirely with a 16mm Steadicam rig in
thirteen extended shots of nearly ten minutes each.
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
1/14
3/10/2014
2/14
3/10/2014
hardcore band. Time passed and I traded Providence for Suriname two years in the Peace Corps, the
only movies I saw in the Paramaribo theater were out-of-focus (Saving Private Ryan, 1998) or burning
in the gate (70s GERMAN PORN). Those theaters later became churches, then casinos. I lived in a
jungle village, learned an obscure language, wrote a letter a day on a missionarys typewriter, shot three
rolls of super-8 and decided to be a poet.
TAILS:
After grad school, after jungle surrealist films and pinhole films and slow-mo old-timey films and video
voice-overs and synch-sound films I moved back to Providence, I got dark and lonesome. Cinema
became inert so I tried to find a way out of it, realized that Id been circling around non-fiction like some
dumb buzzard, decided to land and sink my talons into the body that had always clearly been there.
Prior to that moment, Id made images of worlds that were somehow somewhere else to the left of this
one, I used to say. I dont know if it was heartache or age or that damp Northeastern air, but I suddenly
developed a taste for the present that hasnt left me since. All of those early cinema re-enactments and
collaborative ethnographies, the later Trypps and my recent feature [Let Each One Go Where He May
(2009)], these are all about addressing the now in a meaningful way. Im entered into a contract with
the present for the sake of the future however long it may take to roll out.
3/14
3/10/2014
conversations with the artists that make up our MFA program. I could never really speak cogently
about the plastic arts before I started at UIC, but I sure can talk the shit out of em now.
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
4/14
3/10/2014
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
5/14
3/10/2014
6/14
3/10/2014
BWT#4 was initially intended as an apology for the avant-garde aesthetics and sensibilities of
BWT#1 and BWT#2. I didnt feel like either of those films were very representative of my interests or
abilities as an artist, and I was a bit embarassed that they were both getting play and winning awards
around and about. I think theyre fine films, theyre just not what Im after or about. Anyway
BWT#4 was meant to be a play on words its in four sections, its in black and white, it features a
black comedian telling jokes about black and white people, and the main character trips (or trypps)
during the course of the film. Id had the footage, 16mm picture slug of Richard Pryors 1979 LIVE IN
CONCERT, for a few years, and it seemed like the right time to use it I figured that by making hi-con
contact prints of the original footage and then mirroring them in multiple directions, I could make
something totally apeshit to watch. I didnt anticipate the optical effects that would ensue (retinal
afterimages! Purplegreenred!) and it wasnt until I started working with the original sound that I realized
how heavy Richard Pryors monologue was. The film stopped being an apology and became an
attempt to force a critical conversation between race, representation, and experimental cinema.
Black and White Trypps Number Four from Ben Russell on Vimeo.
After all of that hand-processing and contact printing, I was a bit shocked to find TRYPPS #5 (DUBAI)
just waiting for me out there in the world. It presented itself to me while I was recording sound on a
project in Dubai, and I wasnt sure for a while afterwards whether or not it was actually a film. Turns
out it was the combination of candy-neon flicker and inquiry into global capital was all it needed.
Although that film is technically silent, the beats produced through onscreen movement place it well
within the lineage of the other sound films in the series.
I shot TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) while making LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY, and while it
does exist in a slightly shorter incarnation in the latter film, I do think of it as a film in its own right. I
decided to release it into the world with this understanding my onscren presence with the slate at the
beginning of the film not only rhymes with the beginning of BWT#3 (as does the ending, with the
flash/photographer), but it foregrounds the essential question of how much is construction and how
much is actuality. This doesnt happen within the context of the feature, or if it does, it transpires in a
very different fashion. TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) makes a great deal of sense within the series, pointing
as it does to the function of trance and ritual ( la Jean Rouch), the ethnographic, and the ecstatic. It felt
like a great partner to BWT#3 in particular, and I do like that the time of this film is undeniably the same
time as the films that preceded it this is all happening now, in the world.
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
7/14
3/10/2014
Like BWT#4, TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) was meant to top off the series well see if that happens or
not. This is the first piece that Ive made specifically for a video installation, and while itll soon enough
have a life as a single-channel film, Im presently unsure as to what will be lost/gained when Space and
Repetition are taken away, when it becomes a 10:00 film. As it stands, the film is still a bit new for me
and Im unsure as to how/what to talk about it, save that its another great instance of serendipity
determining the course of events within the frame that Id established. I initially tried and rather
magnificently failed to be the figure onscreen those cliffside Badlands elements conspired against me,
or actually with me, as the end result is much better than any I couldve imagined
Theres an ongoing conversation about the function of trance throughout the TRYPPS series, and since
the specter of drug use hovers over the secular instances of trance, TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) seemed
like the right moment to address this topic directly. Ever since seeing FUNERAL PROCESSION OF
ROSES, Ive wanted to make a portrait of someone in an altered state; cinema always seemed like too
radical of an imposition however, and it took a really specific failure for me to allow myself to make the
seventh film in this series. As was the case with BWT#3, Im not at all interested in producing a record
of experience the idea of making a record of something so radically subjective and internal (an acid
trip) is preposterous. The turns that the film ends up taking are reflective of my attempt to produce a
cinema that operates on its own terms, that produces its own experience, that can function as a site of
transcendence unto itself.
8/14
3/10/2014
After a few years of doing programs like this, I had my first solo show and suddenly realized that my
curatorial approach was a mirror to my practice stylistically all-over-the-place but conceptually
coherent. Ive since come to see it as an important piece of my practice on the whole it serves as a
vehicle for sorting out my relationship to the world, to art, to media and vice versa.
Last year I started a gallery space in my apartment called BEN RUSSELL with fellow artist-curator
Brandon Alvendia. There wasnt much money to support the sort of film/video curating Id been doing
in Providence (where I was funded by Brown University and state arts grants) and I felt quite
comfortable in what I could do with it, so I decided to move into terrain that I was more uncertain about,
a space that truthfully kind of freaked me out. Brandon and I made a set of rules and restrictions about
how we would exhibit work, decided to have 5-person group shows with each classically-defined
medium represented, and determined that wed use the letters from ben russell to determine the
themes. Weve had 8 shows since we started BEER, BLUENESS, and LESSEN were the best of the
lot.
Let Each One Go Where He May, 135 min, 16mm, color, sound, 2009
(7) Seven irrelevant questions:
(A) Do you own a laserdisc player and laserdiscs?
Nope, but when I was in high school I babysat for a family who had CONAN on laserdisc, and I would
watch it once the kids were asleep. Wouldve been better to just watch that disc spinning, probably.
(B) What two colors look best together?
Blue + Orange
(C) Name something you hate; name something you love.
Headaches! Always my right eyeball getting stabbed through the back. Optical illusions.
(D) What is your favorite Hollywood action movie?
ALIENS.
(E) What is your favorite alcoholic beverage?
Whisky on the rocks, as an Old-Fashioned, or styled after the Manhattans my father drinks nightly.
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
9/14
3/10/2014
//////////////////////////////
More:
Ben Russells Website
Ben Russell on Vimeo
Ben Russells Gallery
Magic Latern Cinema
Let Each One Go Where He May on Cinema Scope
Related posts:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010, and is filed under avant-garde, documentary / ethnography,
experimental film, film, interview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments
and pings are currently closed.
10/14
3/10/2014
Navigation
--> Home
--> About/press/submit
--> FB
--> Feed
--> Send email
--> Twitter
--> Vision Quest 2013
--> Vision Quest 2012
--> Write for dinca.org
1mage
Amalia Ulman
Attilia Fattori Franchini
Ben Russell
Brenna Murphy
Bunny Rogers
Emilio Gomariz
Michael Bell-Smith
Michael Robinson
Phil Solomon
Ruth Gruca
Sabrina Ratt
Sara Ludy
Sarah Weis
Stephanie Barber
t0p 5
Andrew Norman Wilson
Chris Cuellar
Jen Stark
Jennifer Chan
Jon Cates
Mary Rachel Kostreva
Nick Briz
Sara Ludy
Theodore Darst
Interview
Ali Hossaini
Ben Russell
Blake Whitman, Vimeo
Deborah Stratman
Duncan Malashock
Jeremy Boxer, Vimeo Fest.
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
11/14
3/10/2014
Matt McCormick
Nicolas Sassoon
Petra Cortright
Rafael Rozendaal
Rosa Menkman
Sara Ludy
Tami Yeager, Tribeca
Will Reed
Hand Motions
(handmotions.dinca.org)
Comments on YouTube Comments
A Reaction to Limitless
Transformers in the Age of Drones
Writing and Reading: Mosaics and Nonlinearity, Part One
Chris Lee and Speculative Numismatics
On Pirate Ethos
Recommended Reading / Cybermohalla Hub
Changing Education Paradigms
Notes on Here Comes Nobody
Local Law 11
Projects from Petros Moris and Kernel: Part One
Post-Figurative Legitimacy in Internet Culture
Introducing Hand Motions
Essay
Likes and Notes At a Glance: Consumption Without Contextualization by Louis Doulas
Review
Takeshi Murata's "Synthesizer" Series
Video Party Fliers by Lucky PDF
The Waiting Game by Chris Collins
/SYS by The-Drum & Theodore Darst
Goldie (2012) by Carl Ryan Stemple
Master Plan (2012) by Robert Todd
CAPTCHA / Chp Two (2012) by Gabrielle de Vietri
Walt Disney's Taxi Driver (2011) by Bryan Boyce
Hyper Geography (2011) by Joe Hamiliton
Undergrowth (2011) by Robert Todd
349 (for Sol LeWitt) by Chris Kennedy
ScanOps & Googleplex by Andrew Norman Wilson (2011)
Thoughts on Haywire (2012)
DINCA: Top 10 Films of 2011
Woman Not Included by Maria Zendre
Three Worst Superhero Films of 2011
Captcha (2010) by Gabrielle de Vietri
Brief Thoughts on Drive (2011)
Thoughts on Contagion (2011)
Cineapolis by Alex Hubbard
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
12/14
3/10/2014
Dincategories
Select Category
Dincarchives
Select Month
Dincauthors
Andrew Rosinski
Louis Doulas
Ria Roberts
Wyatt Niehaus
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
13/14
3/10/2014
C o l o p h o n and i n f o
DINCA Powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).
TWIN PEAKS theme design by Andrew Rosinski.
Built on a Mac.
Set in Univers + Helvetica / Arial.
send emails to: ar@dinca.org.
Bored? Look at: sacred-visions.com.
DINCA.ORG | SACRED VISIONS 4 U.
CHICAGO, IL
http://dinca.org/interview-ben-russell-chicago-based-filmmaker-artist/6256.htm
14/14