Against Time
Ben Russell explores how we experience time in his latest striking and hallucinatory short film.
About the film
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.
Even though the title symbolically implies a conflict about the presence, Against Time is actually a film about moving forwards, despite everything.
About the filmmaker
Ben Russell (b. 1976, USA) is an itinerant 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 which focuses on artistic innovations within ethnographic film, this will entail screening and conversations in the cinema, as well as sharing film essays and a connected film program on Kunstnernes Hus Home Cinema.
This series is supported by the Norwegian Film Institute and Fritt Ord.
Get tickets to Russell's latest feature film TheInvisible Mountain with a digital talk with the director, 6/6/23, here.
Get tickets to til Ben Russells TheInvisible Mountain, 14/6/23, here.
Read Kenneth Moe's essay on Russell and “psychedelic ethnography" here. (In Norwegian only)