Ben Russell Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography

The Ataraxians

7.0(0.0K)

From the south of France, a science fiction film about the end of the Leisure Class and that which came to replace it.

Rock Me Amadeus by Falco Via Kardinal by Otto MuehlMOVIE

The Ataraxians

Rock Me Amadeus by Falco Via Kardinal by Otto Muehl

5.0(0.0K)

(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.

Rock Me Amadeus by Falco Via Kardinal by Otto Muehl

DaumëMOVIE

Daumë

5.7(0.0K)

Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.

The Death of Abraham Lincoln (In Three Parts)MOVIE

Daumë

The Death of Abraham Lincoln (In Three Parts)

6.7(0.0K)

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

The Death of Abraham Lincoln (In Three Parts)

Abraham Lincoln

The Red and the Blue GodsMOVIE

The Red and the Blue Gods

4.0(0.0K)

An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods.

The Red and the Blue Gods

The Red God

Extra TerrestrialMOVIE

Extra Terrestrial

4.5(0.0K)

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas

Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder

Not rated yet

Through softly textured 16mm photography and regional iconography, Silva offers a modernist reflection on two of upstate New York’s most storied 19th century touchstones—the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the legend of Rip Van Winkle—nodding to a few musical heroes along the way.

Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder

Production

River RitesMOVIE

River Rites

6.6(0.0K)

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.

Let Each One Go Where He May

7.7(0.0K)

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.

Let Each One Go Where He May

Trypps #7 (Badlands)

6.1(0.0K)

"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

Trypps #7 (Badlands)

Black and White Trypps Number ThreeMOVIE

Black and White Trypps Number Three

7.0(0.0K)

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.

Black and White Trypps Number Three

The Invisible Mountain

Not rated yet

"La Montagne Invisible" is an installation conceived as a journey into the infinite : an immersive multi-channel AV installation that transforms the material of a Finnish wanderer's secular pilgrimage towards a utopian summit into an infinite video labyrinth of beginnings, endings and disjunctive in-betweens.

The Invisible Mountain

Director of Photography

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness

Black and White Trypps Number OneMOVIE

Black and White Trypps Number One

5.9(0.0K)

"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." - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition (TIE)

Black and White Trypps Number One