Ben Russell
Ben Russell (born 1976) is an American experimental filmmaker. Russell developed his reputation over the numerous shorts he made throughout the 2000s, many as part of his "Trypps" series, and as the curator of the Magic Lantern Cinema in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2009, he made his acclaimed feature debut, Let Each One Go Where He May, shot in Suriname in a series of 13 long takes accomplished with a Steadicam. Russell attended Brown University from 1994 to 1998, where he received a BA in art and semiotics. It was during his last year at Brown that Russell became interested in filmmaking, and shot his first film on 16mm. Afterwards, Russell traveled to Suriname with the Peace Corps. The experience inspired many of his films, and the country ended up as the setting for his first feature-length work, Let Each One Go Where He May. Early in his career, Russell befriended the English experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers and the two would later co-program a touring series of their work. He received an MFA in film and video from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Russell currently lives in Paris.
Writer
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The Breathers-In
Ben Russell’s early short pushes silent film narration into uncharted territory. Two women in Victorian dress land in a new country by sea and wander its emptied industrial landscape. They call each other sister and learn to make money. One is diagnosed with scurvy by a...Watch Movie -
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...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #3
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...Watch Movie -
The Death of Abraham Lincoln (in Three Parts)
Started in 1998 but completed in 2000, THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (IN THREE PARTS) is an ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president. Each chapter is loosely connected to the others via a...Watch Movie
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Black and White Trypps #2
J.T. Rogstad, author of The International Exposition, "A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap....Watch Movie -
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,...Watch Movie -
Let Each One Go Where He May
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY is the remarkable debut feature from filmmaker Ben Russell. "And the gods said, they said that this is no way for human beings to live. The gods would help them. 'Let each one go where he may.' So they ran." - Lantifaya MasiakiikiWatch Movie
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The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, THE TWENTY-ONE LIVES OF BILLY THE KID presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen: Billy the Kid as the...Watch Movie
Director
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The Breathers-In
Ben Russell’s early short pushes silent film narration into uncharted territory. Two women in Victorian dress land in a new country by sea and wander its emptied industrial landscape. They call each other sister and learn to make money. One is diagnosed with scurvy by a...Watch Movie -
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...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #3
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...Watch Movie -
Trypps #6 (Malobi)
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It's Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set. TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series...Watch Movie
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The Death of Abraham Lincoln (in Three Parts)
Started in 1998 but completed in 2000, THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (IN THREE PARTS) is an ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president. Each chapter is loosely connected to the others via a...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #4
Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #2
J.T. Rogstad, author of The International Exposition, "A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap....Watch Movie
-
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,...Watch Movie -
Let Each One Go Where He May
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY is the remarkable debut feature from filmmaker Ben Russell. "And the gods said, they said that this is no way for human beings to live. The gods would help them. 'Let each one go where he may.' So they ran." - Lantifaya MasiakiikiWatch Movie
-
Atlantis
Loosely framed by Plato's invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, ATLANTIS is a documentary portrait of Utopia (an island that has never/forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet). Herein is folk song and pagan...Watch Movie -
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...Watch Movie -
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. Equal parts...Watch Movie
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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.Watch Movie -
The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, THE TWENTY-ONE LIVES OF BILLY THE KID presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen: Billy the Kid as the...Watch Movie -
Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai)
115 years later, a(nother) remake of the Lumière 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...Watch Movie -
He Who Eats Children
In Suriname, in a small jungle village, blindfolded girls and boys play a kind of hide-and-seek – the one with the monster who catches and eats children. According to local legend, the monster is the village’s only white person, a Dutch man who repairs outboard motors....Watch Movie
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Tjúba Tén (The Wet Season)
TJÚBA TÉN/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...Watch Movie
Cinematographer
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The Breathers-In
Ben Russell’s early short pushes silent film narration into uncharted territory. Two women in Victorian dress land in a new country by sea and wander its emptied industrial landscape. They call each other sister and learn to make money. One is diagnosed with scurvy by a...Watch Movie -
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...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #3
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...Watch Movie -
Trypps #6 (Malobi)
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It's Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set. TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series...Watch Movie
-
The Death of Abraham Lincoln (in Three Parts)
Started in 1998 but completed in 2000, THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (IN THREE PARTS) is an ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president. Each chapter is loosely connected to the others via a...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #4
Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #2
J.T. Rogstad, author of The International Exposition, "A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap....Watch Movie
-
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,...Watch Movie -
Atlantis
Loosely framed by Plato's invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, ATLANTIS is a documentary portrait of Utopia (an island that has never/forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet). Herein is folk song and pagan...Watch Movie
-
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...Watch Movie -
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. Equal parts...Watch Movie -
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.Watch Movie -
The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, THE TWENTY-ONE LIVES OF BILLY THE KID presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen: Billy the Kid as the...Watch Movie
-
Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai)
115 years later, a(nother) remake of the Lumière 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...Watch Movie -
He Who Eats Children
In Suriname, in a small jungle village, blindfolded girls and boys play a kind of hide-and-seek – the one with the monster who catches and eats children. According to local legend, the monster is the village’s only white person, a Dutch man who repairs outboard motors....Watch Movie
Editor
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The Breathers-In
Ben Russell’s early short pushes silent film narration into uncharted territory. Two women in Victorian dress land in a new country by sea and wander its emptied industrial landscape. They call each other sister and learn to make money. One is diagnosed with scurvy by a...Watch Movie -
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...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #3
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...Watch Movie -
Trypps #6 (Malobi)
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It's Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set. TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series...Watch Movie
-
The Death of Abraham Lincoln (in Three Parts)
Started in 1998 but completed in 2000, THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (IN THREE PARTS) is an ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president. Each chapter is loosely connected to the others via a...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #4
Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #2
J.T. Rogstad, author of The International Exposition, "A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap....Watch Movie
-
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,...Watch Movie -
Let Each One Go Where He May
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY is the remarkable debut feature from filmmaker Ben Russell. "And the gods said, they said that this is no way for human beings to live. The gods would help them. 'Let each one go where he may.' So they ran." - Lantifaya MasiakiikiWatch Movie -
Atlantis
Loosely framed by Plato's invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, ATLANTIS is a documentary portrait of Utopia (an island that has never/forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet). Herein is folk song and pagan...Watch Movie
-
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...Watch Movie -
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. Equal parts...Watch Movie -
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.Watch Movie -
The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, THE TWENTY-ONE LIVES OF BILLY THE KID presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen: Billy the Kid as the...Watch Movie
-
Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai)
115 years later, a(nother) remake of the Lumière 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...Watch Movie -
He Who Eats Children
In Suriname, in a small jungle village, blindfolded girls and boys play a kind of hide-and-seek – the one with the monster who catches and eats children. According to local legend, the monster is the village’s only white person, a Dutch man who repairs outboard motors....Watch Movie
Actor
-
The Breathers-In
Ben Russell’s early short pushes silent film narration into uncharted territory. Two women in Victorian dress land in a new country by sea and wander its emptied industrial landscape. They call each other sister and learn to make money. One is diagnosed with scurvy by a...Watch Movie -
The Death of Abraham Lincoln (in Three Parts)
Started in 1998 but completed in 2000, THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (IN THREE PARTS) is an ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president. Each chapter is loosely connected to the others via a...Watch Movie
Producer
-
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...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #3
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...Watch Movie -
Trypps #6 (Malobi)
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It's Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set. TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series...Watch Movie
-
The Death of Abraham Lincoln (in Three Parts)
Started in 1998 but completed in 2000, THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (IN THREE PARTS) is an ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president. Each chapter is loosely connected to the others via a...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #4
Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible...Watch Movie -
Black and White Trypps #2
J.T. Rogstad, author of The International Exposition, "A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap....Watch Movie
-
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,...Watch Movie -
Let Each One Go Where He May
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY is the remarkable debut feature from filmmaker Ben Russell. "And the gods said, they said that this is no way for human beings to live. The gods would help them. 'Let each one go where he may.' So they ran." - Lantifaya MasiakiikiWatch Movie -
Atlantis
Loosely framed by Plato's invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, ATLANTIS is a documentary portrait of Utopia (an island that has never/forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet). Herein is folk song and pagan...Watch Movie -
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...Watch Movie
-
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. Equal parts...Watch Movie -
Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai)
115 years later, a(nother) remake of the Lumière 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...Watch Movie -
He Who Eats Children
In Suriname, in a small jungle village, blindfolded girls and boys play a kind of hide-and-seek – the one with the monster who catches and eats children. According to local legend, the monster is the village’s only white person, a Dutch man who repairs outboard motors....Watch Movie

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