Ben Russell

The Twenty-One Lives of Billy The Kid

Ben Russell

Dave Grant, Sharon Ambielli

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

Ponce de León

Ben Russell, Jim Drain

“I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.” -- Ponce de Léon Our PONCE DE LEÓN discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he became old forever – an 80-year old Spaniard who would continue to walk the earth for century after century after century, watching as coral foundations gave way to mangrove swamps, as swamps were drained and buildings were erected, as buildings decayed and swamps returned. Our PONCE DE LEÓN is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma – it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de Léon, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself.

He Who Eats Children

Ben Russell

A speculative portrait of a Dutchman living in the Surinamese jungle - fixing canoe motors, accused of eating the locals' children.

Black and White Trypps Number Three

Ben Russell

The third part in a series of films dealing with naturally-derived psychedelia. Shot during a performance by Rhode Island noise band Lightning Bolt, this film documents the transformation of a rock audience’s collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.

Let Each One Go Where He May

Ben Russell

Benjen Pansa, Monie Pansa

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 prior. A path still traveled to this day, its changing topography bespeaks a diverse history of forced migration.

Rock Me Amadeus by Falco Via Kardinal by Otto Muehl

Ben Russell

Ben Russell, Celeste Neuhaus

(3:00, video, color, sound, 2009) 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.

Let Us Persevere in What We Have Resolved Before We Forget

Ben Russell

Isaac Wan

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

Terra Incognita

Ben Russell

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.

Trypps #7 (Badlands)

Ben Russell

Ruth Gruca

"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

Ben Russell

Trance dance and water implosion, a line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Shot in a single-take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of an animist are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps, embodiment is our eternal everything.

Greetings to the Ancestors

Ben Russell

'Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand.' (Ben Russell)

Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai)

Ben Russell

115 years later, a(nother) remake of the Lumiere Brothers pseudo-actuality film La Sortie des usines Lumière. This time around our factory is a job site, a construction site peopled by thousands of Southeast Asian laborers, a neo-Fordist architectural production site that manufactures skyscrapers like so many cars.

Color-Blind

Ben Russell

A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial legacy of a post-postcolonial present.

Good Luck

Ben Russell

A visceral non-fiction portrait of hope and sacrifice in a time of global economic turmoil, filmed between a large-scale underground mine in post-war Serbia and an illegal mining collective in the tropical heat of Suriname.

Black and White Trypps Number Four

Ben Russell

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.

Beast

Ben Russell

BEAST, described in numerous circles as a “three-piece percussive drone/noise force, complete with two drummers and skull-based strobe-electronics” is comprised of three 6’ 2”+ artist/ musicians Thad Kellstadt, Tim Nickodemus and Ben Russell. Members’ projects have been viewed at La Casa Encendida (Madrid), the Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival (Netherlands), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Epileptic eyes! Heart attack ears! BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST