Thursday April 16th at 7:00PM

LOCATION: Carpenter Center Lecture Hall, Harvard University.
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138



Balagan and Film Study Center at Harvard University are pleased to Present:

RECENT ANTHROPOLOGIES
:
THE FILMS OF BEN RUSSELL (Russell appearing in person)
The maker of a diverse range of films and videos that have included a pinhole film of Easter Island, a portrait of an audience at a Lightning Bolt concert and a flicker film set to a Richard Pryor monologue, Ben Russell is one of the few artists that is working to make 16mm relevant to the contemporary media landscape (while playing off the varied histories of filmmaking itself). Featuring three 16mm films shot primarily in the Maroon villages of Suriname, South America, this program will focus on a major strain of Russell's work that complicates traditions of ethnographic and documentary film.

FEATURING: Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) (8:00, 16mm, 2008), Daumë (6:00, 16mm, 2000), Tjüba Tën/ The Wet Season (co-directed with Brigid McCaffrey, 47:00, 16mm, 2008), Black and White Trypps Number Three (11:00, 35mm, 2007), Trypps #6 (Malobi) (12:00, 16mm, 2009)
TRT 84:00

BIOGRAPHY
Ben Russell is an itinerant curator and media artist whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East India Trading Co. buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and solo screenings at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art. A 2008 Guggenheim award recipient, Ben began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, and he currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

NOTE: All works screened will be shown on film in 16mm or 35mm. Program is subject to change

Program Details:


Daumë (6:00, 16mm, 2000)

"One of the strangest films I have ever seen; its characters come and go as if they're 'primitives' posing for the camera, either obeying or fighting an ethnographer's controlling eye."- Fred Camper, Chicago Reader film critic

 

 


Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) (8:00, 16mm, 2008)
114 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.

 

 

 



Tjüba Tën/ The Wet Season (co-directed with Brigid McCaffrey, 47:00, 16mm, 2008)
Tjüba Tën/ The Wet Season is an experimental ethnography recorded in the jungle village of Bendekondre, Suriname at the start of 2007. Composed of community-generated performances, re-enactments and extemporaneous recordings, this film functions doubly as an examination of a rapidly changing material culture in the present and as a historical document for the future. Whether the resultant record is directed towards its subjects, its temporary residents (filmmakers), or its Western viewers is a question proposed via the combination of long takes, materialist approaches, selective subtitling, and a focus on various forms of cultural labor

 





Black and White Trypps Number Three (35mm, 12min, 2007)

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.

 

 

 



Trypps #5 (Dubai) (3:00, 16mm, 2008)
"APP APPAP APP APAPPAP APP APP APP APAPPAPAPPAP APPAP APP"
A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism.

 

 

 


Trypps #6 (Malobi) (12:00, 16mm, 2008)

From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. Or: It's Halloween at the Equator, Lightning Bolt for the jungle set.