Oliver S. Pérez: You have described your work as existing between documentary and ethnography. How did your early experiences and relationships with any particular filmmakers, artists, or anthropologists shape your thinking about form early on? 

Ben Russell: It all started when I was in college. I attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where, in order to take film or video production courses within the context of the Modern Culture and Media department, you had to take at least one year of media theory and critical studies. So, before I had even picked up a camera, I had to read texts about everything from Foucault to how images are constructed and what they mean. I hadn't had any exposure to experimental cinema either. I grew up in the suburbs of Southern California and the most radical things that I had seen up until that point were probably Twin Peaks and MTV. It was at university when I really started watching films with a kind of critical eye. After taking these courses for a year, I enrolled in my first documentary film and history course. The ways in which media was presented to me created an immediate understanding of the documentary field as a construction, where everything was built and everything was a decision.

During this time, Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassembled (1982) was a really important film to me. She talks about how, when you frame, you're not actually framing, and when you edit, you're excluding. To me, an anecdote that really points towards this is a note of Minh-ha, where she mentions that in particular, white women walk up to her after watching Reassembled and say, "It's amazing how beautiful the women in your film are. They're so well dressed." Her response to that is, "Well, they knew that we were going to be making a film, so they wore their best clothes." I would say that's how I understand the origin of my ideas about construction in relation to the image and the subject.  At some point, this aligned with my studies in contemporary art practice, where the dominant idea was that the way you make a thing is also what you're making. I later understood that this concept really came out of structuralism, especially in avant-garde cinema. Those ideas all really led me towards an understanding of image construction as a set of relationships between subjects, myself, the on-screen subject, and the audience's subject, but also about the way that material and all of the forms of production determine the choices. For instance, if you have a million dollars, you'll make a very different kind of film than if you have sixty dollars.

I wasn't exposed to a lot of experimental work until I was in graduate school. I had the luxury of living in Chicago at that time where there's a lot of really great experimental film screenings. And it was there that I saw films like Michael Snow's work or Hollis  Frampton’s. There’s a film that he made with Michael Snow, Nostalgia (1971), which is quite  incredible. And also films like Chantal Ackerman’s D’est (1993), which is a kind of tracking shot that traces out the shift from one space to another space, one cultural space to another space. In the earlier stages I remember being quite affected by Louis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929), because that seemed to be a proposition for a really different way of thinking about narrative, or maybe it proposed that cinema was like a set of  feelings or affects and not necessarily a continuous stream.  

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OsP: Do you see yourself as part of that lineage of experimental filmmakers?  

BR: Yes, definitely.

I was first exposed to American avant-garde cinema in the mid-to-late nineties and would say I have a very encyclopedic knowledge of it. I mean, I've seen most of the stuff. I've also done film programming curation since 2003 and put together nearly 150 programs of films and short films. These are always based a bit on Amos Vogel's Cinema 16 programming. The Cinema 16 selections brought together really different kinds of cinema. So yeah, I definitely come from a lineage of  experimental cinema, but my first exposure was to narrative cinema, like everybody else; to television series,  music videos and documentary practices. When I started making experimental films, I would say that all of those were in it. There wasn't anything like a pure sensibility or pure approach. The insistence on 16mm as a form was  something that typified a lot of experimental work before the mid ops. And even though I've only really ever worked in 16mm, I never thought about it as a thing that I have to do. It's just more the thing that I like to do. But, yeah, I'm still mostly interested in experimental work. Not just in cinema, but in music and performance as well. The things that I like are maybe more underground,  more marginal, less narrative, and more visceral I guess.  

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OsP: Do you feel aligned with any particular tradition?  

BR: I mean, it's a funny moment to be a filmmaker right now. I've made a lot of films, about forty shorts and five features and to me, they're all quite different in their ambition and their material approach. I think they're getting more similar now, because I don't have as many tools as I used to.

I’ve always been interested in being a part of multiple lineages; I don't see the point of staking a claim in one particular territory because I find what's interesting, and what's interesting about working with an experimental medium or experimental music, is pushing against the edges of the other works. I would say my work is somewhere in between experimental cinema and  documentary. And sometimes I talk about the influence of ethnographic film practices in my work.  But I'm not an anthropologist, and so I'm not beholden to ideas of science or truth or objectivity.  In fact, I don't really believe in them.  

But those are the spaces that are the most interesting to move towards, because they're the ones that,  from my perspective, pose the most problems. And I think pure subjectivity and beauty are also not,  like, very interesting in themselves. 

OsP: Your projects, especially those in relation to ethnography like River Rites or He Who Eats  Children, often emerge from a sustained engagement with the communities you portray. How does  the duration of these relationships affect your formal decisions? And what does collaboration mean in your process beyond subject–filmmaker dynamics? 

BR: When I was 22, I lived in a jungle village in Suriname for two years. I was a  development worker, not because I wanted to be a development worker, but just because I  wanted to have a pretty radical experience elsewhere and knew that I also wanted to continue to make films. I had the great fortune of living with a pretty unique group of  humans, and I learned to speak their language and have been back a number of times over the years. Both those films you mentioned, River Rites and He Who Eats Children, but also Let Each One Go Where He May, Trypps #6 and Tjúba Tén (The Wet Season) are all films that were made with this particular community. I've made films in other places where I don't speak the language and can't communicate and it's less interesting. You miss a lot, when you can't talk to people about what's going on.

Having also studied postcolonial theory, I would say that one of the challenges of film-making has always been to give oneself license to make films. As a white, heterosexual American, my people have been on one side of the camera for a really long time — both sides, actually — and have been making decisions about how folks get represented for a long time. Although postcolonial theory has become sharper since the late nineties, the idea remains the same: that nobody really has the right to make images of somebody else. If you want to make images, you must figure out an ethical and moral way to do so that involves consent. However, morality and ethics are subjective, so I would say that the formal decisions are always meant to reflect my relational position. Shooting with a Steadicam creates a certain kind of distance in the subject-author-subject relationship. When you're able to get close to a subject, it means there's an accord between you. The subject is allowing you to be there. So, yeah, that's one thing to keep in mind. Then there's the topic of time, which has its own demands on the way it is approached. It changes from film to film. Hopefully. The challenge is trying to keep doing new things, you know?

Let Each One Go Where He May (2009)

OsP: For time in particular, I've seen that a lot of your films privilege duration over editing, real  time unfolding. What do you think duration allows you to access formally that montage cannot?  

BR: I would say that the most remarkable aspect of cinema, or rather, the thing that interests me the most, is its capacity for a kind of time travel that simultaneously produces empathy. I don't think you can ever truly know a subject. However, if you spend time in their proximity, you can begin to understand them, and a relationship from your body to their body is sort of produced. That only happens with time. If you have a long take, you're asked to exist within a space of gesture, repetition and movement. For example, in a film like Let Each One Go Where He May it allows you to kind of walk next to it, not in front of and not behind, but nearby. 

Montage suggests a really different kind of time, and I don't think that one is better than the other. I've made films that have really intense editing in them, but I think the long take is especially well suited to portraiture. By portraiture, I mean not just human subjects, but also the spaces they inhabit. Those spaces are places where time is relative. For example, jungle time is very different from city time. It's really different from concert time. There are all these different temporalities that exist.  When I was living in Suriname, I was most conscious of this because it was a space without electricity or running water or cell phones and, you know, time was a lot more  seasonal. So you are asked to pay a different kind of attention.  

I once saw a film, but I forgot who the filmmaker was. It had a lot of walking in it. It was sort of like Jean Rouch's Jaguar (1967) and films by Chantal Akerman. Then 10 Skies (2004) had a profound effect on me. Returning to the idea of time travel, when you're faced with a long shot in cinema, you are simultaneously in your body and in the shot. It's as if you're occupying those spaces simultaneously. Gene Youngblood talks about this in his work Expanded Cinema (1970), contrasting the passive and active viewers. I feel like the durational image creates an activity within the viewer, making them aware of themselves. People talk about that as boredom, right? And boredom is really just a consciousness of  the self, which then implicates everybody else in the space, like the people around you, and how sound is operating, how the image is moving. Narrative cinema generally wants you to be unaware of that. It doesn't want you to be conscious or self-aware. Obviously, I don't think one is more important than the other, but I do find that particular kind of self-awareness quite pressurising. I also think it's a space for reflection because you are not the subject. You're not with the subject. You're not moving through space with them. You're just  watching a two dimensional image of them, and you're allowed to have a temporal relationship  that's happening in real time between yourself and the subject. 
 

OsP: For these long shots, how do you approach composing within them?  

BR: I suppose it depends on whether there's movement or not. The first time I really took that on was in Black and White Trips Number Three. I knew how I wanted to make the film and what I wanted to happen in it. Because I decided to use a full camera roll, I had to consider time as both a quality and a quantity. If you're not going to cut, you have to consider what happens within the frame over time. Montage, or the cut between images, is also a kind of movement. 

I recently watched Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, projecting it silently without the distraction of the soundtrack. It was great, but also shocking how often the movements within his shots  can surprise you. They're so minimal in terms of what they're after. A subject will enter the frame from one side and the camera will turn this way. When you're looking at something that seems still for a while and it suddenly moves, it really changes everything. Everything you're looking at becomes different. I became pretty conscious of that while making Let Each One Go Where He May, where the conceit was that every shot would be ten minutes long. The question was always, how do I make the shot change over time? Where does it begin? Where does it end? Even if what I'm filming is in the middle of something, an event that doesn't have a beginning or an end. What will happen within the shot to constantly allow it to redefine itself and create a kind of dynamic energy? I would take a  stopwatch and walk for ten minutes and try to think about what the shot could be or what the movements where or what I wanted to happen. And I feel like River Rites is that as well, where I  had kind of roughly staged out the movement of the camera, but then I would say the strength of  that film is really the chaos that all of its actors or performers bring to it. Maybe it's not so different from my approach in Direct Action. Every shot was limited by the length of the camera roll, but I didn't necessarily intend to shoot ten-minute-long shots. I just wanted to capture the whole thing. 

OsP: Other than time use, something I really admire about your films is their use of sound. When  you start working on the film, do you start constructing it visually or sonically? Or does sound  come naturally?  

BR: It really depends on the film, but I would say that, on the whole, because I work in 16mm, I have to decide whether to record sound when I'm filming. The camera doesn't have a built-in sound recording device, so if I want synchronised sound, I need a separate recorder. I have to clap my hands in front of the slate. When I'm filming alone, as I was for Greetings to the Ancestors, He Who Eats Children and several of the Trypps films, it’s difficult. I can't hold the camera and record the sound at the same time. So, if there's a shot where sync is important, I need to make sure I have the sound. If it's not important, I can just record the sound later. And that's something that I really love about 16mm filmmaking.  

The first camera I used was a Bolex. The Bolex is quite loud, and its spring mechanism means that it is not synchronised and makes noise. You can never actually achieve synchronised sound, which means that, unless you want to make silent films, to produce this soundscape  you have to pull from a lot of different spaces. You're always fully constructing and building up the sound. Those early experiences of working that way were really instructive when it came to doing things later on. Also, if you have the sound of the image when you're editing, it's really difficult to get rid of it. But if you don't have the sound, it's easy to construct it, and what you're going to build is going to be much more expansive and nuanced that way than it would be if  you were just recording the sound of the event.

Generally speaking, if I'm making something now, I'll sync sound at the same time. In feature films, I tend to have a sound recordist, and sound recordists insist on recording the sound. There's always sync, but I had the great opportunity to work with Nicolas Becker, a genius who is a sound editor, musician and composer. When I made A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013) with Ben Rivers, Nicolas was primarily a Foley artist for French cinema.  When he decided to work on our  film, he took this process of making Foley sounds and applied it to the documentary image. So all of these sounds that existed were either replaced or amplified in a way. They became much more, so much bigger and they had more depth. The sound was richer. We've continued to work together, and that practice has really informed the way that I work within the production of the diegetic image.

In a lot of other films, I'm editing and working with sound at the same time because I'm not really able to privilege one over the other. When I made Atlantis, I had a revelation because I spent a month filming it in Malta and captured a lot of beautiful images. I would say that I'm a good cinematographer, but I don't think it's difficult to create beautiful images. They're just images in themselves. Ugly images can be great too. You know? I didn't know what to do with them. I had made a series of long field recordings and decided to use those after struggling to find my way through the editing process. I decided to use them as the basis and edit image to sound instead of sound to image, which really changed the relationship of the cut and created a different kind of motivation, and maybe as a more poetic, emotional space — something less casual and more visceral.

OsP: One of my favourite uses of sound in your films is the music choice for River Rites. I love the  hard contrast between the calming soundscape of the people around the river and the harsh noise  rock that plays afterwards. Did you start the film knowing you were going to use that music?  

BR:  I had no idea. That was originally a shot from Let Each One Go Where He May. While I'm making films, I never see what I'm shooting. I film it but I don't have playback or a recording device. It's not until a month or so, or two weeks, after I've finished shooting that I actually get to see the images I've made. I knew this shot wouldn't work for this feature film because the vibe was completely different compared to what I wanted. Yet, I kept coming back to that shot every once in a while because there was something about it that really affected me, and I was trying to understand how to transform it into something else.

I was thinking a bit about John Smith's Girl Chewing Gum and had read an interview with Maya Deren in which she talked about reversal, what it does to an image, and how it's connected to dreams. She also mentioned how it shifts causality. So I tried it, I flipped the image and when I flipped it, everything that hadn't been working in that shot suddenly worked. There’s so many kids in that scene and a lot of them are constantly looking into the camera. Then, when the film goes in reverse, the kids are suddenly always looking away from the camera, which has a really different effect. When I moved it backwards, I realised that I needed to think about how the sound was produced. I had originally imagined that I would create that sound myself. I’d put the track from Mind Flayer in as a temp track and it was so effective because there were so many percussive notes that matched every action on screen.

OsP: Some of your work moves between straightforward documentary, simply filming what’s  happening, River Rites being an example, and pieces that are somewhat staged, almost like  performance. How do you decide which moments stay purely observational and which ones become  performative?  

BR: I always think of filmmaking as a kind of choreography. Often, what happens is much more interesting than what I had planned. It is thought that Trypps Three was quite instructive in that. It unfolded exactly as I wanted. I decided to start filming at a specific point because I wanted the audience to feel fatigued in a certain way. I also chose to keep the slate in there because I like the idea that this is a film, not a concert. It's a recording of a concert or a representation of a concert. I knew that the second half of the film was what I wanted to achieve.  

I was hoping for all of these things to happen, but I didn't actually think about them in detail. For example the way the art students move, the kid who puts his hand on his face at the end and yells, the flash that happens at a certain moment. It's all a  matter of choosing the right moment to film and then allowing the moment to really resonate in terms of whatever it's offering. But there is always a camera present, so there is never an objective position; there is always a subjective position. There's always a construction, and the thing that happens is always happening either because I've initiated it or set the stage for it, but then it just kind of does what it does by itself. 
 

OsP: Do you think that construction, that performance is a strategy for truth or just a way of  destabilizing it?  

BR: Strategy for truth? I don't think I believe in the truth.  

OsP: That’s an interesting point. I guess I’m asking whether it’s a way of showing something as  objectively as you can or just a way of performing something to destabilize that objectivity.  

BR: What I love about performance is the excitement of seeing that thing happen, unfold in real time, and understanding that it's actual.  There's a precarity to doing something live that doesn't exist when you're making a recording. I guess I'm speaking more in terms of music, but I would say that I've taken on that strategy of  filmmaking to allow for this precarity to exist because when it works it's much more ecstatic. It's  much more electric.
 

What I want cinema to do in a really broad sense is not to replicate experiences, but to produce them. And so in order for the documentation of a performance to be something, to not just be subordinate to the performance, then it has to do something else. That 'something else' is cinema. Another example is surround sound. It's the ability to get close to a subject and then pull far away, to change the frame. The thing itself is happening, but the way it is filmed changes.

It's this collaboration that results in something that's not entirely new, it’s not an invention, but it happens. This is why I don't work in fiction. I don't imagine myself to be very good at storytelling. I'm not so interested in language -or I am- but in terms of cinema. I get a lot of pleasure from experiencing the thing in the moment and understanding what comes out of it and it's been interesting to see that evolve. 

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OsP: You mentioned that you don’t work with fiction. I was curious how you think about structure  when you’re not relying on plot.  

BR: That’s a good question. I mean, narrative is just a chain of cause and effect relationships and I  would say that if you get rid of narrative, then you have to find the cause and effect in some other  way. So cinema is necessarily a kind of additive process, where what you see after the first image  has the possibility to reframe the first image, reposition it, discount it, you know? But once you  have two images the first can't affect the second. I feel like filmmaking for me is an additive process  where one thing leads to next, leads to the next, leads to the next, leads to the next, and the question  of the edit is always: what does it change? How does cutting at this point change what we are just  seeing? What does it shift in terms of what we understand?

Part of making movies is paying attention to the films themselves. A film is always the  result of the images and sounds that you've accumulated. I used to really like the process of  going to a place for a month, having a certain amount of film, and at the end of the month, making  something out of what I've recorded and not being able to go back. I rarely do reshoots or have multiple takes of shots. Almost everything happens once, and if it works, I use it; if not, I don't. I don't make it again unless I feel it's really important. This is because it usually isn't important. I didn't understand this until I started filming. So, yes, I would say that there are many different ways of structuring a film. Like initially, I imagined He Who Eats Children as a horror film, where we're presented with a certain kind of story at first. We're trying to understand what it is, and the story unravels over time so that by the end, our understanding of it is quite different from our initial perception of it. And there's a kind of accumulation of feeling that happens along the way that informs what this thing is, it just kind of keeps rotating.

I've been trying to trust my intuition more when making decisions. I try to reduce the number of decisions I make so that I don't end up with too much material. Editing is also based on how much material you have. For example, if you shoot thirty minutes, maybe ten or fifteen minutes of it will be good. This gives you a film that's maybe ten or fifteen minutes long, which also determines its own structure. It's not just about what I want; it's also about what I have, and how those things come together and what they do once they're gathered. Yeah.