ALL | Against Time: Three Films by Ben Russell

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Arts + Literature Laboratory | 111 S. Livingston St. #100, Madison, WI
@ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

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. A $1 fee will be added for single admission credit card charges, but no fee for multiple admissions ($10 or more). Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
“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.'” –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.
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
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
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.
This event is made possible by support from Dane Arts; Madison Arts Commission with additional funds from Wisconsin Arts Board and National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funds also provided by Endres Manufacturing Company Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, Inc., charitable arm of The Capital Times, the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation, and the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation. Support also provided by an generous anonymous donor.