2012 Images and Views of Alternative Cinema
Lefkosia, Cyprus
Trypps 1-7 & River Rites
Eight
Films by Ben Russell
curated and presented by Vassily Bourikas
in the presence of the filmmaker
 |
| Ben Russell at IVAC 2012 |
Curator
Vassily Bourikas brought Ben Russell and eight (actually nine) of his films to Images and Views of Alternative Cinema
2012 in Lefkosia, Cyprus. Together they
presented Trypps 1-7 & River
Rites: Eight Films by Ben Russell. Ben Russell describes his Trypps series as ‘an ongoing study in
Trance, Travel, and Psychedelic Ethnographies’.
In his essay for the festival program book ‘Ben Russell Makes Films
Alright…’, Vassily Bourikas remarks that ‘Every word in this short description,
including “ongoing” and “study”, echoes the key elements of his approach to
filmmaking.’ Entering into the
phenomenology of vision and cinema, Russell’s films are more of a constellation
exploring the literal and metaphoric journey of experiences beyond the
rational, scientific realm of existence.
For
me personally, it was an incredible experience to view all of Ben’s Trypps series chronologically followed
by his latest film River Rites. This offered something of a Trypp (a journey)
through Ben’s creative output, creating an arch of sorts that opened the
possibility of seeing Trypps as one
on-going film, with rites being the new trypps. After fashioning a makeshift
takeup reel, Russell and Bourikas screened, in a wonderful unannounced treat,
Russell’s latest film that he made with Guillaume Cailleau: Austerity
Measures a portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made
during the anti-austerity protests in late 2011. Beautifully timely…
The
following is information about Ben’s films and Vassily’s program and links to
where you can view some of these films on-line:
Black and White Trypps Number One 2005 6.5’ 16mm
‘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. Seashells, snow, jewels,
static, planets, mitochondria, trash, leaves. Rings, flowers, stars, hair,
ghosts, comets, cartoons, demons. Icebubblesinstrumentscatsmarblestwigsfiref
liespinwheelsins ectscraters. Buzzing. Reeling…. .flfkkkkk #################
############### ############ #### ########### ### ### ###### #
######################## ###### Overkill. Birth/ Death. Moment by moment,
symmetrical—organized like geometry, like Muslim rugs, like math."
JT Rogstad, The
International Exposition (TIE)
A
psychedelic op-art film that references the traditions of hand-painted
Avant-Garde cinema by replacing it with something entirely different.
Hypnosis is imminent.
Black and White Trypps Number Two 2006 8’ 16mm
 |
| Ben Russell's Trypps Number Two |
Ben
Russell continues his initial impulse for the series, the exploration of
“naturally-derived psychedelia”, with this cadenced phantasmagoria of negative
imagery and negative space. The tendrils
of sharp white trees become osseous arteries against the black void of the sky. The spiraling spine of a massive tree collides
against a spanning pan effect.
Representation morphs into abstraction as the film becomes a study in
density and fearful symmetry in the forest of sight. By film’s end, the arboreal is left far
behind as the film strip becomes an engulfing, vertiginous maw.
Chris Stults, Viennale
2009
Black and White Trypps Number Three 2007 12’ 16mm
 |
| Ben Russell's Trypps Number Three |
Trypps Number Three transports the documented
transcendence of Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres
fous from the Huaka movement to a Lightning Bolt concert where overlapping
bodies, swaying to noise rock, are framed in light beamed from the stage—we
return to the models of Caravaggio or Garrel—bodies effectively transformed
into islands of individual gestures and expressions via a spotlight and
lingering camera, before the film cryptically bends upon itself: henceforth the image (through slow-motion
effect) and sound (through Joseph Grimm’s spacey drones) conspire to directly
invoke the spectator into the raptures.
Mubarak Ali, Supposed
Aura
Black and White Trypps Number Four 2008 10.5’ 16mm
“Jesus
Christ, look at the white people, rushing back. White people don’t care,
Jack...”
Richard Pryor
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.
Ben Russell
“APP
APPAP APP APAPPAP APP APP APP APAPPAPAPPAP APPAPAPP”
A
radically restricted camera was similarly fixed on half of a neon sign in Ben
Russell’s Trypps #5 (Dubai) (2008),
which displayed the letters “APP” and only half of a “Y” in an erratic,
discontinuous pulse. If the mention of
Dubai conjures a cosmopolitan skyline, Russell renounces the possibility of
seeing even a single street. As Mark
McElhatten writes in the program notes, “Happiness is always incomplete”, and
here, in a critique that Debord may have particularly appreciated, it’s brightly
colored sign for a shop that promises everything but sells nothing.
Genevieve Yu, Reverse
Shot
Trypps #6 (Malobi) 2009 9’ 16mm
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.
Ben Russell
Trypps #7 (Badlands) 2010 10’ 16mm
 |
| Ben Russell's Trypps #7 (Badlands) |
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
River Rites 2011 11.5’ 16mm
 |
| Ben Russell's River Rites |
“Animists
are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are
human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”
Graham Harvey, Animism
A
trance dance water implosion, a newer line drawn between secular possession and
religious phenomena. Filmed in one shot at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname
River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist everyday are revealed as time
itself is undone. Rites are the new trypps; embodiment is our eternal
everything.
Ben Russell
Unannounced addition to the program:
Austerity Measures (Ben
Russell and Guillaume Cailleau) 2011 8’ 16mm
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
grafittied marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls—hand-processed and
triple-exposed in red, green, and blue.
 |
| Ben Russell at IVAC 2012 |
Filmmaker Biography
Ben
Russell is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and
performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the
moving image. He has had solo screenings
and exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film
Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, threewalls, and the Museum of Modern
Art. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and
2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben began the Magic Lantern screening series in
Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space Ben Russell in Chicago, Illinois, and
performs in a double-drum trio called Beast. He currently resides in Paris, France.
Filmography
2004 Last
Days
2005 The
Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid
2005 The Red
and the Blue Gods
2005 Black
and White Trypps Number One
2006 Black
and White Trypps Number Two
2006 Michoacan: La Muerte / El Traidor (co-directed with
Sabine Gruffat)
2007 Black
and White Trypps Number Three
2008 Tjuba
Ten / The Wet Season (co-directed with Brigid McCaffrey)
2008 Black
and White Trypps Number Four
2008 Trypps
#5 (Dubai)
2008 Workers
Leaving the Factory (Dubai)
2008 The
Black and White Gods
2009 Trypps
#6 (Malobi)
2009 Let
Each One Go Where He May
2010 Trypps
#7 (Badlands)
2011 River
Rites
2011 Austerity
Measures (co-directed with Guillaume Cailleau)
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