BEN RUSSELL

Un film op-art psychédélique qui fait référence aux films peints de la tradition du cinéma d’avant-garde tout en proposant quelque chose de radicalement différent. L’hypnose est imminente. – [Light Cone]

“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. Icebubblesinstrumentscats marblestwigsfireflie spinwheelsinsectscraters.
Buzzing. Reeling….. flfkkkkk###################################################################################################Overkill. Birth/ Death. Moment by moment, symmetrical ​- organized like geometry, like Muslim rugs, like math.” – [JT Rogstad, The International Exposition (TIE)]

“Deux sortes de renversement en jeu impliquant à la fois le noir et blanc, ainsi que la réflexion et le chevauchement.” – [Light Cone]

​”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 of a branch twined into two through a mirroring 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]

“Ce film est le troisième volet d’une série qui traite des phénomènes psychédéliques produits de manière naturelle. Tourné pendant une performance du groupe de noise-rock originaire du Rhode Island, Lightning Bolt, il documente la transformation de l’extase collective d’un public en un rite de transe du plus haut niveau spirituel – Black and White Trypps Number Three est un tableau cinématographique d’une extase séculaire qui rappelle les grandes toiles de l’Annonciation de Titien et de Caravage.” – [Michael Sicinski, Portail du film documentaire]

“Trypps Number Three transports the documented transcendence of Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous from the Hauka 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]

“Utilisant des séquences d’un long métrage en 35mm avec l’acteur Américain Richard Pryor (récemment décédé), ce film est un test de Rorschach visuel.” -​[Light Cone]

“Jesus Christ, look at the white people, rushing back.  White people don’t care, Jack…”  – [Richard Pryor]
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“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 APPAP APP”

“Une sémiotique du capital, du bonheur, et la phénoménologie sous les néons clignotants du capitalisme.” – [Light Cone]

“APP APPAP APP APAPPAP APP APP APP APAPPAPAPPAP APPAP APP”
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“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 a brightly colored sign for a shop that promises everything but sells nothing.” – [Genevie Yu, Reverse Shot]

​”Halloween en Amérique du Sud selon Ben Russell. Un concert de Lightning Bolt dans la jungle, au cœur d’un village maroon, Malobi, au Surinam, est l’occasion d’une intrigante cérémonie au dieu Pan. Danses, processions de masques et possessions, filmées en 16 mm, caméra à l’épaule, son direct et plan-séquence, passages dans le même mouvement de l’un au multiple, du général au particulier, du moderne au traditionnel, Trypps # 6 est un hommage à la ciné-transe de Jean Rouch.” – [Yann Lardeau, Portail du film documentaire]

“​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) retrace, par une longue prise de vue intime, la défonce d’une jeune femme sous LSD dans le parc national Badlands puis finit par transformer les paysages désertiques en une abstraction formelle et psychédélique. Touchant au romantisme, au sublime, à l’expérience phénoménologique et au spiritualisme non religieux, l’œuvre poursuit l’enquête unique de Russell sur les possibilités du cinéma comme lieu de transcendance.”- [Michael Green, MCA Chicago, Portail du documentaire]

“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]

“Les animistes reconnaissent que le monde est rempli d’individus dont certains sont humains et que la vie est toujours vécue dans un rapport avec d’autres.” – [Graham Harvey, Animism]

Une danse de transe, l’implosion de l’eau, une ciné-ligne tracée entre une possession laïque et des phénomènes religieux. Filmés en une seule prise sur un fleuve sacré du Haut Suriname, les secrets mineurs et quotidiens d’un animiste saramaccain nous sont révélés pendant que le temps lui-même se défait. Les rites sont les nouveaux Trypps – l’incarnation est notre Tout éternel. – [Ben Russell, Portail du film documentaire]

​”Animists are people who recognize 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]

​Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena.  Filmed in a single take 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]