Against Time

An evening of non-narrative, experimental films from Ben Russell is on the docket. Against Time is “a tone-poem in blue and red”; Color-Blind is a synesthetic Polynesian fever dream; Trypps #7 (Badlands) encompasses an LSD trip in the Badlands National Park and then goes abstract. You might want to take a cab home from this Mills Folly Microcinema program.

media release: Mills Folly Microcinema presents Against Time: Three Films by Ben Russell on Wednesday, November 29 at 7:00 p.m. Admission $5.00, free for ALL members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 6:30 p.m. A $1 fee will be added for single admission credit card charges, but no fee for multiple admissions ($10 or more).

About Ben Russell

"Ben Russell - filmmaker, artist, curator - challenges conventions of documentary representation from within to produce intense, hypnotic, and, at times, hallucinating experiences. His curatorial work follows his filmmaking, which unfolds between experimental cinema and a form of speculative ethnography; he calls it 'psychedelic ethnography.'

Watching a film by Russell means going on a nonnarrative, ritualized journey, one that short-circuits the visceral subjective charge of psychedelia with ethnographic protocols of visualization and objectification. The particular power of his filmic work lies in underscoring the affinities and differences to be found between these two different states. An experience that he forges, on the one hand, through examining the cinematic apparatus itself and its potential for immersion and mimetic identification, and, on the other, by the very subjects and subject matter of his films, which often traverse the liminal and engage in altered states of consciousness and in secular practices of ritual and trance. 'Transformative experiences,' Russell says, 'go hand in hand with critical awareness of cinematic devices and their historically coded limitations.'

Born in 1976 in Massachusetts, Russell now lives in Marseille. He became known through his series Trypps (2005-10), in which he first worked with the physical experience of noise music. Nevertheless he quickly moved on 'to include the various poles of action painting, avant-garde cinema, portraiture, stand-up comedy, global capitalism, and trance dance à la Jean Rouch,' as he notes. Several feature-length films, installations, live performances, and short films have followed. And, as the founder of the Magic Lantern screening series (among many others), Russell has conceived of and organized over one hundred thematic film and video programs." - Hila Peleg, documenta 14

Against Time | 2022 | Digital File | 23 minutes 

A tone-poem in blue and red.

Blue > a soundtrack melted out of a Cyndi Lauper CD leads into an(other) attempt to find a way through the fog of recent years. Filmed between the Carpathian Mountains, Vilnius punk clubs and the Belarusian Independence Day celebration in 2019; inspired by the work of the late filmmaker Jonathan Schwartz.

Red > a structuralist diary: mood + sea + movement. A long fade, an index of one kind of everything at once, a soft immersion. Filmed in / around Marseille between 2021-2022.

Color-Blind | 2019 | Digital File | 30 minutes

A synaesthetic S16mm portrait made between French Polynesia and the French province of Bretagne, Color-Blind recruits the restless ghost of Paul Gauguin as an uneasy spirit guide in excavating the colonial legacy of a decidedly syncretic post-colonial present. Featuring im/material guest appearances by: white-tipped reef sharks, color tests, Aldous Huxley's "Island," any number of sunsets, Marquesan techno, Herman Melville, authorized Gauguin reproductions, an illegal kava ceremony, the beach in the 4th season of Survivor, traditional face tattoos, Haka dance rehearsals, Warren Sonbert's "Short Fuse" and a first-hand account of 1 of the 210 nuclear tests conducted by the French government in Polynesia between 1960-1996. Language: French, Marquesan, English.  Subtitles: English. Production format: 16mm.

Trypps #7 (Badlands) | 2010 | Digital File | 10 minutes

"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

Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at Project Projection events.