The Invisible Mountain is a hybrid film, combining documentary, concert video, road movie and a spiritual journey, and accompanied by hallucinatory musical performances by the Finnish guitar duo Olimpia Splendid and the American percussionist Greg Fox.

Through a mixture of landscape and psychedelia, the film follows Russell and his protagonist Tuomo Touvinen as they embark on a great journey from Finland through Belarus, searching for the invisible mountain from Renè Daumal's surrealist novel. The long stretches are constantly interrupted by recordings from the aforementioned experimental noise band, as well as from Russell himself. He suddenly starts doubting Tuomo's project, questioning him on its origins, and begins to suspect that Daumal's premature death was a bad omen.

Ben Russell (b. 1976, USA) is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. Formal investigations of the historical and conceptual relationships between early cinema, visual anthropology, and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences concerned at once with ritual, communal spectatorship and the pursuit of a “psychedelic ethnography.”

A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient for his feature film Let Each One Go Where He May, Ben Russell began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space Ben Russell in Chicago, toured with film/ video/ performance programs world-wide and performed in a double-drum trio called BEAST.

The screening is a part of a program series focusing on artistic innovations within ethnographic film, which will include screenings and conversations in the cinema, as well as commissioned essays and program on KH Home Cinema.
This series is supported by the Norwegian Film Institute and Fritt Ord.

Ben Russell's short film Against Time (2022) is available for streaming here.

Read Kenneth Moe's essay on Russell and “psychedelic ethnography" here. (in Norwegian only)