Ben Russell Collection ( Let Each One Go Where He May / A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness / The Rare Event / The Invisible Mountain / Against Time / Color-Blind / Last Days / Daumë / The Quarry / Terra Incognita / The Red and the Blue Gods / Trypps #5 (Dubai) / Trypps #6 (Malobi) )

Ben Russell Collection (Blu-Ray) (*)

Out of Stock

Original Title: Let Each One Go Where He May / A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness / The Rare Event / The Invisible Mountain / Against Time / Color-Blind / Last Days / Daumë / The Quarry / Terra Incognita / The Red and the Blue Gods / Trypps #5 (Dubai) / Trypps #6 (Malobi)
Screened, competed or awarded at:
Berlin International Film Festival
Other Film Festival Awards

Language Selections:
English ( Dolby Digital 5.1 )
French ( Subtitles )

Product Origin/Format:
France ( Blu-Ray/Region A/B/C )

Running Time:
788 min

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.78:1)

Special Features:
3-DVD Set
Box Set
Collectors Edition
Interactive Menu
Scene Access
Special Edition
Black & White
Booklet

Movie filmed in 2000-2022 and produced in:
Estonia ( Russia, Eastern Europe )
France ( France, Benelux )
Germany ( Germany, Central Europe )
South Africa ( Africa, Middle East )
Switzerland ( Germany, Central Europe )
United Kingdom ( Great Britain, Ireland )
United States ( USA, Canada )
Malta ( Italy, Greece )
Suriname ( Latin America, Mexico )

Directed By:
Ben Russell
Ben Rivers

Written By:
Ben Rivers
Ben Russell
Geoffroy Grison

Actors:
Monie Pansa
Benjen Pansa
Erwin Akobe
Veronique Akoeba
Delvia Alinda
Misha Amoida
Sergio Amoida
Bernard Dinge
Eduard Dinge
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix ..... Self
Nick McMaster ..... Self
Weasel Walter ..... Self
Tuomo Tuovinen ..... Green Man
Etienne Balibar
Federico Campagna
Manthia Diawara
Ruth Gruca

Synopsis:

Let Each One Go Where He May: 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. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness: A man in search for the creation of utopia in the present. First, as a member of a commune on an Estonian island, then alone in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland and later as the singer of a neo-pagan, black metal band in Norway. The Rare Event: Shot in a creaky, wooden-floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day 'forum of ideas' focusing on the manifold possibilities of 'Resistance', the film initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round. The Invisible Mountain: The Invisible Mountain follows a roadie for the band Olimpia Splendid on a quest to find the fictional mountain. Against Time: Between Carpathian Mountains, Vilnius punk clubs, a Belarusian Independence Day celebration, and Marseille, hovers in a limbo of drone and fog, then descends into stroboscopic clusters of moments and movements. Color-Blind: The ghost of French painter Paul Gauguin, whose late works evoked the Marquesas Islands of the colonial era, hovers over this short film, w as residents of the area are interviewed and local contemporary art is featured. Last Days: The Valley of Fire. Oficina Chacabuco. The Calumet Industrial Corridor. From the outskirts of Vegas to the desert ghost towns of Chile: a pinhole travelogue for the world's end, for what was left behind. Daumë: 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 Quarry: A young woman loses her partner and child in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in London. Terra Incognita: A pinhole film, a cheap robot voice, a makeshift history. An explorer's tale of the unknown part of the world. TERRA INCOGNITA is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure. The Red and the Blue Gods: 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. Performed with live narration and sound effects over a pre-recorded soundscape. Trypps #5 (Dubai): With Black and White confidently transcended in the series, the focus of the titles now shifts to places. And, in the case of Trypps #5, the place is one of berserk neon besplendored with garish colors. As the pastel neon does an excitable song and dance routine that all but turns this single shot into a flicker film of its own, two signs - one in English and one in Arabic - remain rock steady in pushing their hard sell illuminated message. An English-speaking viewer can read one of the signs as 'APP' and infer that the slivers of letters to the right and left complete the word as 'HAPPY.' Is being app part of being happy? Is this store trying to push 'happy' but only able to give 'app'? Trypps #6 (Malobi): The present configuration of the series closes with the wildest Trypp yet. In Suriname, South America, a man enters a residence and emerges wearing a flamboyant mask with a group of others, each wearing unique masks. A single Steadicam shot follows these unearthly and wizened figures as they slowly hobble through the village, until the procession enters into the center of the village where a celebration is taking place. Suddenly the doddering caravan breaks out into a jungle boogie like persons possessed. Based on the start of the shot, we know that this trance dance is all staged for the camera but yet it is also clearly happening. We know we've seen a documentary of some kind... but a document of what? All that becomes clear is that within documentary, reality becomes image and reality becomes choreography. Trypps #7 (Badlands): 'Regarding LSD, brass bells, the youth of today, Terence Malick and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, phase cancellation, the Pine Ridge Reservation and the Romantic Sublime.' That's how Ben Russell describes this surround sound installment of TRYPPS, an ongoing exploration of cinematic transcendence. An intensive portrait staged in the Badlands National Park gives way to a tremendous perceptual bolt by film's end. Russell's live enactment of cinema's persistence-of-vision is literally revelatory. River Rites: 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. He Who Eats Children: A speculative portrait of a Dutchman living in the Surinamese jungle - fixing canoe motors, accused of eating the locals' children. Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai): 'Workers Leaving the Factory' was one of the films screened by the Lumiere Brothers during the first public performance of Cinématograph - Russell resorted back to the source of the film and paraphrased it in a desert city flourishing thanks to oil incomes; however, his workers are not walking, they are merely waiting. Black and White Trypps Number Four: Like the previous Trypp, Number Four is a concert film but back to the 'historicized' black and white palate of the first two films. Because the concert footage is from Richard Pryor's standup act, the Black and White in the title also refers to race. But, almost as a rebuttal to Trypps Number Two, much of the footage here is presented in a Rorschach blot of negative and mirrored imagery so Pryor is portrayed as 'white' as often as he is 'black.' And through the afterimage resulting from the aggressive flickering, colors emerge leading to, as Russell says, 'black and white becoming a fiction - not only in terms of race, but with regard to the material itself.' Black and White Trypps Number Two: 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. Black and White Trypps Number Three: The transformation of a rock audience's collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order. Black and White Trypps Number One: Tying into and playing against a rich history of hand-painted films, the first Trypp starts off with lulling rhythms of interstellar undulations. But instead of referencing the romantic traditions of most cameraless films, as the impasto grows denser this Trypp turns into a fugue state inducing flurry of op art kineticism. If Mesmer were an action painter, the result might look like this vivacissimo tarantella between light and darkness. The screen becomes a snowglobe of activity to scramble your eye's rods into cones. Let Us Persevere in What We Have Resolved Before We Forget: 'John Frum prophesied the occurrence of a cataclysm in which Tanna would become flat, the volcanic mountains would fall and fill the river-beds to form fertile plains, and Tanna would be joined to the neighbouring islands of Eromanga and Aneityum to form a new island. Then John Frum would reveal himself, bringing in a reign of bliss, the natives would get back their youth and there would be no sickness; there would be no need to care for gardens, trees or pigs. The Whites would go; John Frum would set up schools to replace mission schools, and would pay chiefs and teachers.' - Peter Worsley, 'The Trumpet Shall Sound'. Atlantis: The mystery of Atlantis is always alive. In this movie is a presentation of the Ancient Sings and Teachings of Atlantis according to ancient scripts. This movie is a presentation of these Ancient Sings and Teachings about Atlantis. This move has got a Diploma from the International Festival of Nation 2008. Greetings to the Ancestors: Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory's inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand. Good Luck: From the violent and illegal gold mines of Suriname to the cavernous corporate mines of Finnish Lapland, Good Luck is a visceral proposition for Greed as the tie that binds us all. Yolo: Filmed in the remains of Soweto's historic Sans Souci Cinema (1948-1998), YOLO is a makeshift structuralist mash-up created in collaboration with the Eat My Dust youth collective from the Kliptown district of Soweto, South Africa. Vibrating with mic checks and sine waves, resonating with an array of pre-roll sound-this is cause and effect shattered again and again, temporarily undone. O humanity, You Only Live Once! Yolo: Filmed in the remains of Soweto's historic Sans Souci Cinema (1948-1998), YOLO is a makeshift structuralist mash-up created in collaboration with the Eat My Dust youth collective from the Kliptown district of Soweto, South Africa. Vibrating with mic checks and sine waves, resonating with an array of pre-roll sound-this is cause and effect shattered again and again, temporarily undone. O humanity, You Only Live Once!

This product was added to our catalog on Thursday 10 July, 2025.