Over the past decade, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell have become known each for their distinct blends of experimental film, documentary and ethnography. The work of Rivers (b. 1972) has often focused on dreams of remote hinterlands and on non-conformists who seek to forge private kingdoms of their own. Meanwhile, Russell (b. 1976) has channeled the spirit of Jean Rouch, seeking the extreme and the sublime at raucous rock shows as well as in the desert and the jungle. A Spell to Ward off the Darkness is at once the joint project of two friends and the first collaboration between two rising stars of contemporary cinema. The film itself is a triptych of three complementary yet purposely distinct parts, tracing a trajectory through three distinctive spaces, whether rural or urban, primitive or modern. It is left to the viewer to make connections among the three sections, aside from the distinctive presence of artist-musician Robert A.A. Lowe (aka Lichens) in all three parts, acting as a guide inside the film for the viewer. Part trance film, part meditation, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness can be seen as a synthesis of the work of its two directors, combining the haunting beauty of Rivers’ film with the hallucinatory charge of Russell’s. It shows both artists breaking new ground as they jointly grapple with the various kinds of utopia previously explored in their respective work. — David Pendleton
Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
Unknown Speaker 0:00
March 23, 2014, Harvard Film Archive screened A Spell to Ward Off Darkness. This is the recording of the introduction and Q&A that followed. Those participating are filmmakers Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, also HFA programmer David Pendleton.
DAVID PENDLETON 0:22
Hey folks, David Pendleton here from the Harvard Film Archive. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to this, the first of three public events presenting recent work in various media of three artists who've been collaborating recently. We have the two filmmakers with us tonight. Tonight we're featuring the work of filmmakers Ben Russell and Ben Rivers. Their first collaboration, the nonfiction experimental feature film A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, which premiered last summer at Locarno, just premiered last night, had its New York premiere as part of the New Directors/New Films Festival at Lincoln Center, and we're very happy to have them with us tonight. Then tomorrow night, we have a chance to see more of their work by way of a program of short films organized by, that Russell and Rivers made separately, organized by Balagan Films, that'll be presented at The Brattle tomorrow night at 7pm, 24 hours from now. And then on Tuesday night at the Middlesex Lounge on Mass Ave, far end of Central Square, at 9pm will be a musical performance by Robert A.A. Lowe and 16 millimeter projection performance by Ben Russell. So it's a mini festival if you will, and it's taken a number of organizations working together to make this happen. So I do want to say a few words of thanks. I want to thank the folks at The DocYard, who are also co-organizing and co-sponsoring tomorrow night's screening at the Brattle. From there I want to thank Sara Archambault and Ben Fawley. From Balagan, I want to thank Jeff Silva, Maria Nikiforova, and Stefan Grabowski. And my apologies Maria if I garbled your name. From the Film Study Center, Lucian Castaing-Taylor, Ernest Carroll, and Cozette Russell, as well as thanks to Dennis Lim at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for helping coordinate the visit. A number of those people are here, I think a round of applause to recognize their...
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID PENDLETON
If you guys want to stand up and acknowledge... most of you won't, but that's alright. Besides sharing a first name and a set of initials, both Ben Russell and Ben Rivers have been active as filmmakers, more or less, and artists, more or less, since the early part of the new millennium. They both make documentary films, we might say nonfiction films, that grow out of ethnographic and experimental traditions, and particularly the ways in which those different traditions intertwine and intersect. Besides making numerous short films, each has made one previous feature, Ben Russell's That Each One Go Where He May and Ben Rivers, Two at Sea. In fact, one could go on endlessly with a comparison and contrast essay on the similarities and the differences between the two. Both are often drawn to showing figures in a landscape, with Rivers often working on lone figures, making film portraits of people more or less by showing the spaces where they have lived or where they do live. Russell's work is also interested in space and depicting spaces, sometimes social spaces, other times intimate spaces and the kinds of rituals and behaviors that might take place in these spaces. In many ways, the filmmakers I think are interested in utopian spaces, spaces of resistance to the rush and the heedless change of the present day, spaces where inhabitants are free to make the rules, to live with the absence of rules, to revisit the past and reimagine the future. There are differences of course. Rivers seems fested by the archaic, often by the possibilities of the early modernity and Russell by what we might call the arcane, various forms of the sublime, or even the irrational. His series of short films, named Trypps, plays on many of the very meanings of that word, and all of these themes and fascinations coalesce, really interestingly, in A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, the film that we're going to see, in some ways, a journey. It’s three-part structure is often remarked upon and one way you might think of the different sections of the film will be to listen to the soundtrack. There's this section with speech, sections with music, and in sections with silence or with quiet in between. Robert A.A. Lowe, a musician who often performs as Lichens, figures as sort of a stand-in for the audience as he wanders through these various spaces, encountering different kinds of community, and participating in different kinds of community in different ways. I won't give away any more of the film. And now I will turn over the podium to the two gentlemen who made the film, who will be here at the end as well for an extended conversation with you to answer your questions. But now please welcome Ben Russell and Ben Rivers.
[APPLAUSE]
BEN RIVERS 5:26
Thanks, David. That was great.
BEN RUSSELL 5:28
I love the archaic/arcane. It’s on point.
BEN RIVERS 5:32
So yeah, hence, we don't really need to say anything else really. [RUSSELL LAUGHS] And prefer not to, to be fair, to let the film kind of speak for itself first. But thanks for coming. Ben…?
BEN RUSSELL 5:47
Yeah, thanks. Thanks to all the people David listed for getting us up here and organizing this. It's no small feat. So yeah, I think the one thing that we do say having kind of taken this introduction into account and the fact that some people know our work and some people don't. But for those who do...does it matter for those who don’t? Less. Less, I think.
BEN RIVERS 6:12
Less.
BEN RUSSELL 6:13
Just that it seems significant to say at the beginning that this film is a collaboration in every sense of the word. That there is no part that Ben was involved in, that I wasn't involved in and vice versa. And that it was, from its inception to the time of its introduction at Harvard Film Archive, it has been a film which has been entirely sort of woven together. And thinking about it that way, or resisting the impulse to kind of grab on to certain things and play certain things towards one or the other, I think will actually make the experience of the film a little richer. That's mine. Yeah, but we'll be happy to talk about collaboration at the end and all sorts of other things. So thanks again for your time and for being here.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 7:07
Yeah, thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID PENDLETON 7:22
[INAUDIBLE] Ben Rivers and Ben Russell.
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID PENDLETON 7:43
Maybe to start the conversation I can ask the obvious question or a question about the origins of the work and specifically, to what extent did you know what shape the film was going to take when you started and to what extent did it take shape as you were making it? I’m particularly interested in thinking of things like the three part structure, or the use of Robert A.A. Lowe as this sort of figure for the audience to follow.
BEN RIVERS 8:18
Yeah, so we decided to make something together quite a long time [INAUDIBLE] but, so the process started with us, well, becoming friends and then showing [INAUDIBLE] there's something you want to add?
BEN RUSSELL 8:44
No, you’re holding the microphone.
BEN RIVERS 8:46
Sorry. Um, and, so this process of showing our work together then sort of initiated the discussion about actually making something together.
BEN RUSSELL 9:02
Right.
BEN RIVERS 9:03
And I think pretty early on in, like, talking about this idea of making a film, about...I mean we were talking about, like, trying to be in the world with, in a kind of, positive sense and kind of ideas of the sublime and spirituality in a secular world and a relationship to the landscape. It was pretty early on that we decided that we would approach this as a three part thing that if we're trying to, like, understand how to exist in the world, it's impossible to think of it as one singular thing. Like, because then that becomes, like, one answer. And I don't think we have an answer, you know. So it's about asking a question and, like, thinking about working your way through things.
BEN RUSSELL 10:20
Yes. [LAUGHS] I mean, we were thinking about the way forward and it was clear that there wasn't a way forward, that there were multiple ways that sort of happens simultaneously or happened over really long periods. And the conversation that we're having was how, at this point in our life, do we carve out meanings and how did the things that we've done and the things that we do will do sort of gather together or, like, allow for each other to exist and I don't think that we ever saw any of these spaces or ideas as being opposed to one another, solitude and collectivity actually seemed like, I think for us, they come out of the same impulse. And so we're just trying to, like, create a structure in which all of those things could exist simultaneously.
DAVID PENDLETON 11:16
So when you say a way forward, you're talking about a way forward to offer to the audience in terms of thinking about living in the future, or you're talking about a way forward for yourselves, aesthetically? Both, perhaps?
BEN RUSSELL 11:29
I mean, I think when we were talking about it, it was for us, and then we started talking about cinema and audience and what cinema does sort of functionally and practically and emotionally and spiritually and...
BEN RIVERS 11:44
I don't think we would go as far as to be thinking about a way forward [INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 11:54
It’s not prescriptive.
DAVID PENDLETON 11:55
[INAUDIBLE] for the world. Right, right. I didn’t mean that.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 12:01
No, I mean, there are cinemas that are prescriptive, that are, like, diagnostic. And we're also very invested in the cinema as a shared experience and as a body and so...
BEN RIVERS 12:16
Yeah, because I mean, in many ways, what this film is about is also about cinema. And you know, the way that these three parts kind of collide is also what happens in the cinema. It's a collective experience, but it's also a very individual experience. So it's social, but also solitude. It's experiential. And it's a temporary kind of utopia. And a spell to ward off the darkness as well.
DAVID PENDLETON 12:57
Right. Does that have something to do also with the use of Robert A.A. Lowe or his figure because he's somebody who is in some way sort of a spectator, it seems, at the beginning of the film, within the commune, because we see lots of people talking, we see him interact a little bit on the edges of the frame, we don't hear him speak very much. And then there’s the sort of the solitude section and then he becomes himself part of a collective and there he goes from being a spectator in a way to being a performer because then we see the audience. I'm just curious if you were conscious of trying to sort of use him as this thread that also was meant to sort of enhance or encourage the sort of self referential aspect of…?
BEN RUSSELL 13:44
I mean it was always like, here are three spaces or, as I said, three ideologies or philosophies and they're not contained. They contaminate one another and they're like here through this forum, they're happening through a single figure, and that we, as an audience, experience these various forms through his figure. So the relationship between these spaces happens directly through him within the collective. I mean, we were thinking about how one represents the collective without falling prey to finding, focusing on single characters and making them into, you know, significant individuals, but actually thinking about the collective as a group of individuals who all would come to the fore and would recede and, and Rob is part of that. I mean, I think the understanding that we have of his character/persona in the first section is it's recursive. I mean, he does speak and he is engaged, but he's peripheral in some way, but there are 16 people here and so a number of them are peripheral, but it's the decision to pull him out and produce him into this way that we are navigating space and the fact that I mean, yeah. It was also, at some point, important to trouble the fundamental assumptions about these spaces, which is to say, it became really important for us to have somebody as our main protagonist who wasn't clearly from these places, who didn't belong necessarily to these spaces. Somebody who wasn't White, who wasn't Scandinavian, who wasn't, you know, of this group, and Rob fit into this sort of superficial understanding of that, but also into the fact that he's a musician who has a really profound relationship to embodiment and performativity and this ability to actually get lost within himself. I mean, these are all things that we were sort of after.
DAVID PENDLETON 16:01
And what about the order of the film? I mean, was this something that you tried different orders or is it the order that it was shot or something? I'm thinking of it in sort of a sort of a triptych in a way and so I'm thinking of the commune and then Robert by himself and then the concert.
BEN RIVERS 16:18
Yeah, I think the concert was always going to come last because it had to. Yeah, because you can't really begin the film with the concert. It’s too loud. I think if you follow the concert with quiet, it's going to be too extreme. So I think we always knew that that part was going to be last but the other two were, they were actually the other way around for a really long time from conception all the way through, pretty far, to the end of the edit, the commune came in the middle. But then there was a revelatory moment.
BEN RUSSELL 17:04
We talked about the possibility of shuffling the sections, of having them move in different orders. But I mean, because it's again, for us, these are all part of the same thing.
BEN RIVERS 17:12
They're in the same, you know, really, they're on the same timeline. One of the things about cinema, it has narrative progression, so, you can't but help to have A, B, and C. That's not really how we see it. These things, kind of, could be in any order. But eventually, you have to make a decision for cinema. But there is another version of it, which is an installation version, where the three things happen in three separate spaces, and they are literally happening at the same time, which is more about, like how we kind of think about it.
DAVID PENDLETON 17:48
Right. Why, hence, I assume also that the flashes of the triangle that appear between the three sections, right? The idea that they could be happening [INAUDiBLE] They’re all a whole.
BEN RIVERS 18:00
Yeah, it's these three things that make a whole. That there's no, like, hierarchy in the actual triangle. Right?
DAVID PENDLETON 18:08
Right, right. I’m..
BEN RUSSELL 18:11
That was originally the tagline for the film, “there’s no hierarchy in an equilateral triangle.”
DAVID PENDLETON 18:19
I’m curious to hear you both talk a little bit more about cinema as a technology precisely because like, both of you are people who I think explore in your work these questions of older technologies versus newer technologies. And there's a way in which cinema has a foot in both worlds at this point, since it comes from the end of the 19th century and now we're moving into digital cinema. I guess I'm asking if you want to say something both about what it's like for you shooting digitally versus shooting on film.
BEN RUSSELL 18:50
What’s it like for you to shoot digitally?
BEN RIVERS 18:52
I’ve never done it.
DAVID PENDLETON 18:53
Well, there you go.
BEN RIVERS 18:54
I mean, I took a photo with my iPhone of the building.
BEN RUSSELL 18:58
That was the first time, right, you’ve ever done that.
BEN RIVERS 18:59
That was exciting.
DAVID PENDLETON 19:01
But exhibiting it digitally versus on film?
BEN RIVERS 19:06
I mean, I didn't know. They both come with problems. [LAUGHS] I mean, shooting on film, I think is really important to both of us for, I mean, there's a lot of reasons I think but...
BEN RUSSELL 19:23
I mean, with this film we were thinking about alchemy, in a really profound...
BEN RIVERS 19:27
That’s exactly what I was going to say.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RUSSELL 19:31
...way. Yeah, I mean, what happens to… I mean, you have this material that actually changes when light hits it and there's a shift and it seemed... I mean, I think we probably both find reasons or rationales because it's important for us to work in film, but it seemed like the relationship of cinema and the silver halide crystals and what actually occurs is something that seemed like magic. It's significant, and the title of the film as an operating metaphor for cinema, as well as this thing that actually, like, brings light to...
DAVID PENDLETON 12:09
It’s a beam of light.
BEN RUSSELL 12:10
...a dark space. I mean, this is all stuff we thought a lot about and still think about, are like involved and invested in.
DAVID PENDLETON 20:20
So at the same time, you're not concerned about, then, digital projection being how...
BEN RUSSELL 20:25
Well, it costs 20,000 euros to get a 35 millimeter print. That's a lot of other films.
DAVID PENDLETON 20:31
Right. I mean, it seems like the main thing that you...
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RIVERS 20:34
We, you know, yeah, we're working on pretty meager budgets.
DAVID PENDLETON 20:38
Right. Right. And also, I mean, part of the ways in which you're talking about cinema being important is as a sort of a social contract, people as a group watching it, less so than the material basis.
BEN RUSSELL 20:49
I mean, if we could show, I mean, when we can show on film, it's something that we're both enthusiastic about. Maybe my position is a little different, but yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID PENDLETON 21:02
Are there questions in the audience? There's a question in the back there, if you’ll wait till one of our microphones can reach you so we can all hear you. I don't know who's... Robert, are you gonna…? Raise your hand up and look to your left so that Robert...oh.
Audience 21:19
Hi.
BEN RUSSELL 21:20
Hello.
AUDIENCE 21:23
Yeah, I can't, like, tell if the character of the film is one of like total indulgence, or like a kind of tempered restraint. And so I guess my question is, why did you make a film that was so aggressively boring?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RUSSELL 21:44
Well, could you ask the question again, because you said... indulgence and tempered restraint seem like two really different things.
[INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE 12:56
Yeah. If it's like tempered restraint, it's to resist the temptation to make it a more, I guess, like straightforward explicit narrative. And if it's indulgent, in like, it’s in kind of a Tarkovsky way.
BEN RUSSELL 22:12
So the only model for cinema is narrative?
AUDIENCE 22:17
No, I'm asking you.
BEN RUSSELL 22:19
But I mean, it's, you know, it's an aggressive question. So it's important to like…
AUDIENCE 22:22
I don't think so. No.
DAVID PENDLETON 22:26
Well, simply if you're saying that it's a boring film, it’s a rather subjective and hostile reaction.
BEN RUSSELL 22:32
People have said it's really boring. I'm always surprised when people talk about it as being boring, because it's not. I mean, my sense, you know, time is relative, experience is relative, but I feel like this is, yeah, I mean, the kind of cinema that I'm after is one that allows space for me to exist, to be present to like, be reflected. And I sort of assume...well, that's the kind of cinema that I sort of tried to produce, but I'm probably too close to film to understand it's boring.
BEN RIVERS 23:01
What I think I can understand. I can understand the question. I mean, I've made other films that some people have thought were boring. And you know, because they're long, and they maybe they don't have any talking in, and they don't explain things. There's not exposition in the same way that maybe we've come to expect. And I think it's, you know, it's partly to do with, you know, just what we're so used to, the kind of cinema and television that we're so used to that something like this might appear boring, but you're not necessarily prepared to kind of... I mean, the opening shot, in a way, is there to say, this is the kind of time zone you're going into and maybe if that's the time to leave…
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RIVERS 24:00
And you know, because obviously people have different... I personally find it very boring going to see most Hollywood movies. Like I'm really, really excited for the first 20 minutes or so, and then I get really bored because everything is being told to me and I want space to be for me to like, use my own brain and imagination and stuff. And so I think that's the kind of cinema that we're interested in. So that's why I don't think it's an aggressive question, because I think, you know, it's really about what you're, you know, what you're used to. I mean, I think this kind of film maybe does take some kind of, you know, it's like, you have to practice things.
DAVID PENDLETON 24:47
True. I've seen harder films. Yeah, yeah, but yes, but I see what you're saying. Yes.
Unknown Speaker 24:55
That's fine.
DAVID PENDLETON 24:57
Yeah, and there's a question right there. Look, if you look to, you know, to look to your other side.
AUDIENCE 25:04
I want to ask you about your editing choices, especially in the second section where it seemed to me, perhaps you were constructing it differently than in the first and the third. I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but if I'm wrong or right, it doesn't matter because you'll tell me what you were doing. But it seemed to me that you were sometimes taking shots and opening them up and putting other things between them, sort of taking things out of sequence. There was a shot of, let's see, Robert and then a shot of, a close up shot, of some kind of graphic or image or photograph on a table. And then Robert again, and then a kind of close up shot of mushrooms. And then Robert again. Can you talk a little bit about your...
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE 26:11
and I wasn't bored. I'm not saying that, but I'm very interested in what you were doing. And a little second question is, was there a strip of sound, a piece of sound, that we hear at some point in the very opening shot? And does it get repeated in each section, or something like it?
BEN RUSSELL 26:38
Something like it, maybe.
BEN RIVERS 26:40
Something like it. I mean, there's a lot of air in the film, but it's usually quite different air. We worked with an amazing sound designer, French sound designer, who has, like, a huge archive of different air.
BEN RUSSELL 27:02
He’s also in the band Air, coincidentally.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RIVERS 27:09
They might sound similar. For that section that you're talking about, I mean for all the sections we discussed, like different kinds of time, different kinds of experiential time, and cinematic time. And so, you know, for that middle section, you know, it was actually important for us to think about, like the time of nature, which is slow and it's not necessarily action. You know, we were talking about kind of mushroom time as much as human time. So, you know, that's why in that section, there's these kind of long, locked off shots.
BEN RUSSELL 28:12
Yeah, I mean, we're really trying to produce a sense of elliptical, seasonal time or something that was more closely aligned with geology and forest than human time.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 28:29
Yeah. I mean, well, there are some images. The place that we were filming in was a place that had been abandoned by Finnish workers who were brought there in the ‘60s to do forestry. And then the forestry industry became mechanized or something. They all went back, like, 20 years later. So in 1984 is when everybody left. And so the place that we were in was a place that had these vestiges of past humans, which I think is now always the experience of the natural world, of landscape, is one that where civilization is always on the horizon, on the periphery, or something, and we were both struck by these representational images. I mean, there's a calendar shot of a sunset and then we have an image of a sunset, but we're also, like, producing an image of a sunset. So there was some conversation around the representation or the imaging of the picturesque or the sublime. We looked at Renaissance [INAUDIBLE]
[SPEAKER LAUGHS]
BEN RUSSELL 29:37
I always fuck it up.
BEN RIVERS 29:38
[INAUDIBLE] yeah Friedrich’s [INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 29:39
[INAUDIBLE] paintings of the romantic sublime, which have a vast landscape of the tiny figure in it, and instead of reproducing that, we actually wanted to place the figure within the landscape so that he/she would be an element of space and not the determining feature of space. So, that was the way in which we were editing, which is really different than the way we conceived of editing for the first section or the last section, where the the kinds of temporalities that we were hoping to produce operated in different ways, or, you know, like, the more vérité kind of immediate way of representing space and human proximity versus the kind of apparent or supposed single shot camera that moves through real time. These are all things that we were talking about, like how we film, how we edit, how we construct spatial relations between objects.
DAVID PENDLETON 30:48
There’s a question there on the side and then a question over there. Go ahead.
TARAKA LARSON 30:54
I just wanted to comment on that aggressively boring question, because this is like the second time I've seen this, and the first time, I was trying very hard to figure it out. And it was really hard for me. And I was, like, struggling the whole time, and then talking to you afterwards about all these spaces kind of existing at once and like, in one time. So this time I came here, and I didn't really get much sleep last night, and I'm already kind of, like, in a state where it's very fragile-ly in between, like sleep and waking. And I kind of realized that was a perfect spot to be watching this, in this way, because it's almost like meditation is an aggressively boring place to go. You're, like, staring hard at nothing and trying to, like, transport thought. And so I think that in this way, I was aware, this time, there's this other space that was created, like this other triangle sort of, and it's like, the inner space and, like, inner time. And even, like, sometimes I close my eyes and the images would sort of leave these imprints and it was almost like this other sort of, like, alchemy was going on, like, in my brain. And this, like, spirit world was, like, able to sort of exist between, like, my eyes and the screen and, like, inside whatever screen. And I feel like, I don't know, it really made sense this time. It was just, these worlds did kind of exist in this one place, in one time, and it was slow and very beautiful.
BEN RUSSELL 32:55
Huh, thanks. Should we call you out?
TARAKA LARSON 32:56
Huh?
BEN RUSSELL 32:57
Should we call you out?
TARAKA LARSON 32:58
Call me out?
BEN RUSSELL 32:59
Because you were in it, right?
TARAKA LARSON 33:00
Yeah, I mean that's the other thing.
DAVID PENDLETON 33:01
You look very familiar.
TARAKA LARSON 33:05
I spent some time within the movie.
BEN RUSSELL 33:08
Yeah, great.
TARAKA LARSON 33:10
That was in there, too.
DAVID PENDLETON 33:12
The other person talking...
BEN RUSSELL 33:13
Taraka was with us in the commune in Estonia.
DAVID PENDLETON 33:18
You're the one talking about the...
TARAKA LARSON 33:19
You guys all saw me topless. Yes, it’s true.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID PENDLETON 33:23
You were the one talking about linking the physical to the metaphysical right? Which seems like, if I'm not mistaken, just sort of like a really key statement in the film, I thought.
BEN RUSSELL 33:33
Wow. Wow. Oh yeah.
TARAKA LARSON 33:34
Thanks. Thanks, but yeah, I don’t know, could you talk about that a little bit maybe?
BEN RUSSELL 33:39
Yeah, I mean, I'm excited about, I guess, like the question on boredom, which I think, for me, it's really exciting when people are aggressive in Q&A, which I feel like you are, which is okay. But because the question of boredom, like, I think boredom is a really productive space. I mean, obviously, we have a four-minute shot of a guy fishing on a lake. Like it's not following any, like normal...like there aren't explosions going on in the background. It's not fast editing, but there is something about attention and about the way that we experience time. I mean, I feel like it's an important conversation to have and the Q&A doesn't lend itself really to a conversation, but a set of questions and answers or provocations and answers, but I do think this film...I mean, somebody who didn't like it saw it recently. I mean, more than one person probably...
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RUSSELL 34:34
...but said to me is like, you know, this is a film for the cinema, but not for the cinema audience, which is to say, an audience that assumes the kind of popular bent towards cinema but actually it is because this is a film that's showing around a lot. Cinema can have multiple lives and sort of multiple positions.
DAVID PENDLETON 34:55
And spectators can be part of multiple audiences, too.
BEN RUSSELL 34:58
Yeah, for sure. And I mean, narrative for me is usually quite unfulfilling and boring, because I understand the terms. Really, directly understand them. But yeah. Ben, you wanted to say something?
[INAUDIBLE]
DAVID PENDLETON 35:17
Oh, you didn’t want to say…? Yeah, there was another hand up near the back there. And then... Okay, well, first, first Kate in the back, and then you right there.
KATE RENNEBOHM 35:26
One of the things that I found really fascinating about this, and I have to say I don't think I've ever come across this particular combination before, was the idea that kind of community and individual-ness are the sort of main structuring terms, but then the other level that it’s commenting on, that it makes more sense after hearing you kind of talk about how they are, for you guys, both and play at the same time and they're connected, is this level of kind of the perceptual threshold being invoked all the time. So the kind of inability to tell when a sound has arrived or when an image has come up onto the screen and kind of blurring this line between what we always sort of expect, this community as something that you can say, “Oh, well, this is clearly a community versus someone who's clearly by themselves.” And kind of troubling that a little bit. I just thought that was such a fascinating moment as it was happening. And I was wondering if you guys had anything to say about that?
BEN RUSSELL 36:16
Yeah, of course...
KATE RENNEBOHM 36:19
Or not.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RUSSELL 36:20
Yeah, I mean, with the community, we're thinking of the black metal group, we're thinking a lot about how...well first within the commune, there was a conversation that we were having about how to produce how the individual functions within a social space. So there are a lot of shots within that first section where you only see single solitary people doing single activities, but there's always the sound of bodies around. There's always some other social presence and which was sort of, again for us, like mirrored in this black metal construct concert where, you know, there's never a moment where you see all four members of the band at once. You see them as single characters performing within their own space. And then for the audience that also happens again, that you become aware, as we all are, we're here as individuals with, like, clearly defined consciousness in a social space with all these other individuals having ostensibly the same experience, but one that's radically determined by ourselves, you know? And trying to find a way to allow that to happen through these three different spaces/terms was one of the challenges for us. Yeah, I mean, originally, the editing for the commune was much more language-y and much more interactive or something and we decided to, like, pare it down to remove continuities, to make it into a set of instances, I guess, or relations. I don't know if that's an answer. I mean, it's an answer.
[INAUDIBLE]
DAVID PENDLETON 38:12
You know, it's really interesting, what both of you said. I have a follow up question, but first, there's a question right here that I [INAUDIBLE] gentleman has been waiting very patiently.
AUDIENCE 38:21
Okay. Hi. Well, I think you kind of just talked a little bit about what I was gonna ask about. And I also wanted to mention that I wasn't really bored at all. I thought that if you're talking about like, the film had like a tertiary form, like a three part thing, I thought the first two parts of that were pretty captivating. And I wasn't, as you know, I was interested in what was, you know, developing in it. The third part with the concert, it got a little bit hard to watch. And I don't know if it's because it kind of triggered a reaction with me. Because I've been to concerts like that or something and it kind of made me feel like I might have felt like when I was watching something like that. I'm not sure, I’m probably not explaining that very well. But I was wondering, how do you square that, the third part, with the first two, like, aesthetically, and if there's any way to kind of make it all work together.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RIVERS 40:03
Show them together. Yeah, is one thing. I mean, to us, they make complete sense because, as I kind of said earlier is, you know, if we're thinking about humans in relation to other humans, basically, and so the first section is about trying to live together as a community. The second one is taking yourself away from that and being in solitude, but being in solitude is also having an awareness of other people and society because you've made a decision to take some distance from them. And then in the third part, you know, it's almost like a combining of the first two parts there. You know, it's an individual experience, but it's also a community experience. So that's really basic...
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RIVERS 41:04
...like what we were going for with that.
BEN RUSSELL 41:09
Yeah, and nature. I mean, you know, the film is all shot in the Nordic lands. Originally it was going to be in Norway, which is the birthplace of black metal. And specifically we were thinking about the relationship between man and nature. One that's not, you know, like a pagan sort of relationship between the world outside and the world inside, and one that doesn't create like a here and there, that doesn't make a split. And that's something that was specific to that particular part of the world, and particular to this musical genre, which oftentimes has images of dark forests as the cover for an album, you know. I mean, like a really sincere relationship and invested relationship into a space that's not necessarily human, but involves humans, incorporates humans. So, I mean, that's like the emotional or the conceptual relationship between those. But yeah, I mean, I think our conception is that there's a recurrence between each space that when Taraka talks about trance music, she's also talking about black metal. But, I mean, yeah, you make an open forum, and it's asking people to participate in the construction of meanings.
DAVID PENDLETON 42:37
I just want to ask if you can say a little bit about filming inside the commune? And to what extent was that a pre-existing commune? Was it a commune that you guys set up? And what was your participation in the life of the commune other than filming it? And where was this?
BEN RIVERS 42:54
It was in Estonia. Ben and I had been researching various communes and communities and trying to find somewhere in Scandinavia that didn't have any sort of really specific dogma or ideology and also sort of hierarchy within its ranks.
BEN RUSSELL 43:23
And one that would allow us to come and film.
BEN RIVERS 43:26
Yeah, we found one that was really close to being the one in the film, which is in northern Denmark, but in the end, we decided it wasn't quite right for us and they also decided that we weren't quite right for them. They just didn't want cameras. They were suspicious of cameras for good reason. They'd been exploited before by a TV company, but anyway. So then we started going about thinking that maybe the truest way of doing it would be to construct a commune working with people who have, like, deep experiences of living communally, and simultaneously we met an Estonian producer who was excited for us to go and film in Estonia. So, that, location-wise, was getting us there to look at spaces which might be appropriate. So, he told us about this Estonian 70 year-old shaman who had a space that he was kind of willing to let us use for the film. So, then, and at the same time, we met a commune in Tallinn, they live [INAUDIBLE] young folk live together in [INAUDIBLE] in Tallinn, and well, you went there first.
BEN RUSSELL 45:16
So, I mean, as Ben says we were trying to find the place and with the assumption that we would bring in certain elements to it, and when we couldn't find the place, we felt like in a kind of Hertzog meta-truth way that it was actually more truthful, representative, accurate to construct the space. And so we found these Estonians who had, like, a really different relationship to collectivity, having grown up in a country that was occupied by the Soviet Union, until 1992. So their relationship to the commune, in a post-Communist state, was really quite separate. I mean, what was striking about it was that it allowed them to own these ideas in a way that I think folks in the US or in the UK were really faced with the failure of these ideas. And so they felt like they could make something. They could do this thing that they wanted and that energy was really exciting. And so we invited them and then we invited a bunch of other people who had been involved in various ways and situations. One, Paulina Malikin, who has some work that's upstairs, who was part of the Dirt Palace at one point, you know. She's the woman wearing the National Lampoon Animal House t-shirt, which is another kind of collective. And with her two month-old baby and their kids and her husband, Paul Sturtz, who runs the True/False Film Festival, co-runs, and was also a local government leader. You know, like people who have really different ideas about how to live socially but kind of believe in the possibilities of it. So we brought them together and asked them to have conversations around collective experience in a kind of, initially like, awkward way that I think became more fluid as time passed. And it wasn't so different than the way that we constructed the band that plays the black metal band, also. Like we were looking for a band, but we wanted them to do certain things. And we needed Rob to be a part of it. And it seemed, like, kind of uncool to ask somebody to play a version of themselves for our film. Instead, we just brought the musicians we really liked, who were already playing music that we liked, that they liked and could do this thing.
DAVID PENDLETON 47:37
So it's like a supergroup, a black metal supergroup.
BEN RUSSELL 47:39
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DAVID PENDLETON 47:43
I didn’t mean to interrupt.
BEN RUSSELL 47:44
No, it is a supergroup.
BEN RIVERS 47:46
And it's also about that, yeah, no, they are [INAUDIBLE] musicians, but it was about Rob as well and like not, you know, not dropping in him into something that already exists and is fully formed. It's like he was a part of the construction of the commune in the same way as the construction of the band. So that made a lot more sense to us. Yeah. So conceptually, as you know, sometimes when things don't necessarily seem to be going your way at some point for [INAUDIBLE].
DAVID PENDLETON 48:25
And how long did the commune exist?
BEN RUSSELL 48:28
Three and a half weeks. But forever.
DAVID PENDLETON 48:32
Right. Now, it's forever. Immortalized.
BEN RUSSELL 48:35
Yeah. I mean, we were there for [INAUDIBLE]. I mean, the collective called the New World in Estonia is still happening. It's more of like a neighborhood organization in some way. And yeah, I mean, and the band only existed for two nights. Yeah.
DAVID PENDLETON 48:51
Other questions from the audience?
BEN RUSSELL 48:53
There’s so many questions.
DAVID PENDLETON 48:54
One in the middle and then down here. Carson, down here. And then there's a woman over there. There's at least four of you that I see. We'll start with this woman in the middle, and then one in the back, too.
AUDIENCE 49:03
Just to continue what you were talking about. My feeling, because I'm an actress, was all the time, this relationship with performativity. I always felt that the community wasn't a real community, but it was something that was constructed. It's just the way that they related to the camera. But it was very interesting because I felt that the whole piece was about that. And it made me think about gentrification, and almost like a gentrification of the forest, of the gentrification of today's society, and I felt that you kind of built a gentrificated forest for you guys. And, I don't know, that's kind of, like, the finding that I have. I don't know if you have anything to say about that. Maybe it's like, I'm sorry, but maybe it's like a way to understand what gentrification is. I mean, is it like a group of people that, you know, belong to a certain community? You know, today's communities, gentrified communities, are mostly people that are related to the arts or some kind of performance community. I don't know. But it came to my mind, gentrification, right away. I don't know if you have anything,
BEN RUSSELL 50:20
Never thought about it. I mean, really...
BEN RIVERS 50:23
Just for that first part, or for the black metal part, as well?
AUDIENCE 50:30
I think it's a finding. I don't know. You gotta write about it.
DAVID PENDLETON 50:31
I think she means the first part.
BEN RUSSELL 50:32
I mean, just to the first thing you said, the really amazing thing about cinema is that the only people who are good at seeming natural are actors, because there's nothing natural about filming. There's nothing, like, if you're not used to having a camera around you, aka not an actor/not a performer, then your performance is recorded, your awkwardness. And this is something that we were looking at Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of the Summer and Robert Kramer's Milestones as kind of models for thinking about how to deal with reenactment and documentation and bringing in people to get discussions happening. Because it doesn't seem like there's anything especially fluid or, you know, natural about working with non-actors. And yeah, part of the process of filmmaking is figuring out how to work with the stuff you have, right? But in terms of gentrification, yeah, I don't know. I mean, that these people are from really, really different places. And so we were definitely, like talking about what the present allows in terms of...
BEN RIVERS 51:41
The Estonians, they come from there.
BEN RUSSELL 51:43
They come from there, and the Finns are from there. And, you know, the Brits were sort of close, too. I mean, the Americans maybe came the longest distance, but I think that the question was, like, as I always understood collectivity as a decision. It was hard for us to find rural communes in Scandinavia, because most of them are just fishing villages, which are not decisions, those are things that you're born into. And the history of collectivity in the United States usually involves people, perhaps artists, perhaps performers, perhaps people, you know, whomever, deciding to go to a place and form something new, and I'm not sure that that's, yeah, I'm not sure that I’m on the side of the gentrification perspective, but I'll allow it. It’s yours. Yeah.
AUDIENCE 52:34
It’s just a thought.
BEN RUSSEL 52:35
Yeah, so you can run with it. But yeah, but it was about this. Like, what this moment of globalization allows is for people to go, not just to, like a state away, but a country away.
DAVID PENDLETON 52:54
Carson, you want to raise your hand.
BEN RUSSELL 52:57
Hold on to those questions.
DAVID PENDLETON 52:59
Then, there's a couple more than in the back and up here. Okay.
AUDIENCE 53:03
I have a practical question about the filmmaking collaboration, the nature of your collaboration. Specifically, the first and the third sections, there's so many handheld shots. And frankly, the movement of the camera is so organic. Frankly, it feels more like a subjective, I don't know how you collaborate on those shots. I'm curious, like, how do you decide who’s gonna use the camera? At what time? That sort of thing.
BEN RIVERS 53:32
Yeah. Well, the first section, we had two cameras each, so we were both filming. So then we made decisions, kind of by ourselves, but sometimes we were in the same place. So it's not a huge place. Yeah. So we were you know, sometimes one or both of us would be looking at stuff and one of us would run [INAUDIBLE] sometimes we both with the camera in the same place, you know, like at the sauna, I'm shooting one thing while he's shooting kind of something that's happening at the same time but from another angle. So that's why that was kind of fluid in that particular way, and then you know when it comes to editing you forgot who shot what. Mostly, you know, it's just material, mostly. Yeah. And then the last section we worked with a really amazing steady cam operator called Chris Fawcett who Ben had worked with before on his first feature and so we gave him a lot of direction. We told him exactly really where we wanted him to be for each part of the song. We drew him little maps for each song, so then he knew pretty much where to go, and we directed him on like how we wanted him to move like [INAUDIBLE] we asked him to move [INAUDIBLE] you know so really slowly and not do a lot of the things that he would normally do when he's filming a band as a steady cam operator, you know filming [INAUDIBLE] reactions so like that's why you get these kind of slow tracks over black and [INAUDIBLE].
BEN RUSSELL 55:36
And the middle section [INAUDIBLE], we just had one camera, and we would take turns setting up shots. Ben would set up the shot and I would look through and move it, and he would [INAUDIBLE] back and then I would get the next shot. You know, just like that, so that's how it worked and then when we edited [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, I was still living in Paris and Ben’s in London. We just would never work on anything if we weren't in the same space. Which was...
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RIVERS 56:15
Yeah, but I think Ben set that up.
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID PENDLETON 56:22
Yes. There's a question back here, and then we'll go and they'll go into...
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 56:27
I used to live in Chicago, and Rob was living in Chicago. I saw him play a few times, and he's really remarkable. So he's giving a performance on Tuesday, which is worthy of reminding you guys because he's phenomenal. And yeah, I play music as well, and so I was on tour with him. We did a bunch of shows, and we started talking about collaborating. For me, collaboration is a way to, like, get better at what I'm doing or complicate what I know. You know, something. So mostly to work with people who I really like and want to learn from. And so we had discussed that and then at some later point, he just came back as somebody who would be really right and appropriate for this film. And he was happy to do it. He's really a lovely human.
DAVID PENDLETON 57:23
There's a question in the back. Maybe two questions in the back. We'll take the, yes, that question first. And then we'll come up here.
AUDIENCE 57:30
Thank you. I have a question, and then just like a comment/appreciation thing. My question is when you mentioned the air, like the archive with the sound, how was that done? Like what do you mean?
BEN RIVERS 57:49
Nicolas, he collects sounds, so he's made kind of different microphone setups. And he came to visit us in Estonia, as well, with this crazy, like, I don't know, six point microphone thing that he would just sort of place, go and stand in a field for a bit. So, he travels the world for work.
BEN RUSSELL 58:19
He’s a foley artist, so I mean he's a lot of other things, but that's the main...He did the foley work for Gravity for instance. Right. So we spent a lot of time in space with, like, pins. But I mean, so part of what he does is travel to record, make recordings.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 58:41
It's really fun. I think it's hilarious. It’s really great.
AUDIENCE 58:45
Thank you.
BEN RUSSELL 58:46
Yeah, he also did the sound for Wuthering Heights. And so he recorded a lot of bog silence and had a lot of like sounds...
BEN RIVERS 58:56
There’s some Yorkshire. There's some of my air in this room.
BEN RUSSELL 59:00
You know, if you enjoyed the film, and you want to see it again, seeing it in a space that has 5.1 sound is a really different experience because, especially for the second section, we were trying to produce a sense of space, of landscape, of natural environment within the cinema. And that's where a lot of the air came into play to produce, to give silence a body, I guess.
AUDIENCE 59:32
Thank you. And then I just wanted to thank you because last summer I was just inspired to try to capture images, you know, and to try to create some kind of, like, subjective, just observation. I almost took a screenwriting class, and I was trying to think of ways to just capture an inner world of a character but through just shots. And it was really inspiring to see beautiful shots, you know, imagery. Thank you. I think somebody here has a question.
AUDIENCE 1:00:12
I have a couple quick questions. The first one is, can you please tell me what that building was, during the scene of the people on the beach? There was a building in the middle of the lake. What kind of building was that?
BEN RUSSELL 1:00:27
It’s the ghost of civilization.
AUDIENCE 1:00:29
Great answer. And then the second one is, were there any particular Romantic poets or painters that any of the scenes were inspired by? Because I got the sense of romanticism from...
BEN RIVERS 1:00:49
Yeah, I mean, we did. We were looking at a bunch of romantic painters. I don't know if we read any poetry.
BEN RUSSELL 1:00:56
I mean, yeah.
BEN RIVERS 1:00:57
But you know, there's often things in films that have influenced you that are not necessarily direct. They're things that have just kind of burnt in somewhere and come out at a later date.
BEN RUSSELL 1:01:14
I was reading Moby Dick right before, and Rob was actually reading Moby Dick. Queequeg is the character. The name of the band is a character from [INAUDIBLE] And there's a section in it. That's a chapter called “The Spirit-Spout.”
BEN RIVERS
I was reading Philip K. Dick at the time.
BEN RUSSELL
Were you?
BEN RIVERS 1:01:29
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
BEN RUSSELL 1:01:32
[INAUDIBLE] the same. But there's this description of the “Spirit-Spout,” which is the early false sighting of Moby Dick, the white whale, at night where they think that they see this apparition which is maybe this thing that's underneath. And for me, it seemed like a really good way to think about the possibilities of the world. And Ben was reading Philip K. Dick [INAUDIBLE] Awesome.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:02:06
And was it here, or was it while we were eating, you guys also mentioned the painter Caspar David Friedrich?
BEN RIVERS 1:02:12
Yeah, I think we definitely looked at Friedrich...
DAVID PENDLETON 1:02:15
Another romantic.
BEN RIVERS 1:02:16
Yeah, I mean, Friedrich, yeah, he's there in that second section. But I think we kind of, I don't know, we certainly didn't want to sort of try and replicate or illustrate. It was more about the feeling that you get.
BEN RUSSELL 1:02:33
I mean we were talking about Thoreau, and we're talking about Ted Kaczynski, as you know, sort of in the same, like, group of these men who go into the woods and have transformative experiences in the positive and in the negative. But Kaczynski wasn’t a poet.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:02:52
No, but he was a Harvard student.
BEN RUSSELL 1:02:54
Yeah, and Thoreau. Walden wrote around here.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:02:57
Exactly. It all comes back.
AUDIENCE 1:03:00
Thank you very much.
BEN RUSSELL 1:03:01
Thank you.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:03:02
Yes, this woman in the aisles had her hand up for [INAUDIBLE] very patient, and then we'll work our way down.
AUDIENCE 1:03:08
Thank you, I just sort of want to hop back to an earlier question that had to do with the second section and also talking a little bit about the Romantics. So what was sort of striking to me was that in the second section, often you would have these sort of landscape shots where you could see into, like, you know, there was depth and there was like spatial recession. And then you would have a close up of something completely flat, like wallpaper or an image or lichen on a rock or whatever. And you already sort of talked about the relationship with the natural and the manmade, and traces of civilization. But I was also wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you understood depth versus flatness and like landscape, and an understanding of like the figure in the landscape and how you sort of broke that up with things that were flat or prevented this sort of projection into a space or how you think about depth and the figure in cinema.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:03:56
That's a good question.
BEN RIVERS 1:03:59
It's a good question. Ben?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN RUSSELL 1:04:02
I mean, the cinema part is the trick because it's all like, I mean, neither of us have made 3D films, but we're sort of thinking seriously, like, we're thinking about what happens to the three dimensional when it becomes an image projected image and how flatness, like, comes into being. Well, in my mind, we were trying to present the macro and the micro within the same sort of scale, where humans could operate. So the function of depth, I mean, I really love that little tiny, wet mushroom image where the spiders come in around it and then you see, but you know, that's for me, like, I think about that as the same way as the long forest shot, where there's movement within it and there's something in the foreground and background and scale is kind of messed up. I'm not sure that flatness comes so much into it. The only really flat shot is that shot of the wallpaper, which was about a representation of a natural space. I was struck by the fact that we're in the woods, and then you're in a house and in the house is an image of the woods or in the house as an image, you know. I mean, it was really surprising to find those there and spoke in some way towards, like, the ambition to own and occupy or to define the natural world in relation to the human. I'm not sure that flatness and depth were so...
BEN RIVERS 1:05:42
I don't think about that. Maybe time. I think it's more about time and filming of a still image is something that is kind of interesting, when you're thinking about time, you know. It's kind of set. But then when you refilm it, it becomes kind of imbued with time again, especially on film, you know, because you've got the moon and rain. I don't think we ever really talked about depth.
BEN RUSSELL 1:06:21
Especially in, like, the small level. Focus is a function of depth in terms of optical depth, and you have to have a lot of light in order to have a small aperture which produces the illusion of depth. And we don't work with lights, and we weren't getting that high tech. We were kind of taking the things as they were, but we should [INAUDIBLE]
BEN RIVERS 1:06:48
[INAUDIBLE] think about it. Thanks. I film a lot of still images.
BEN RUSSELL 1:06:55
But you don't think about flatness in depth?
DAVID PENDLETON 1:07:00
There's a question on the aisle. Do you still have…? There's a question right here.
AUDIENCE 1:07:07
Can you please identify which Ben is which? Is that a totally irrelevant point?
DAVID PENDLETON 1:07:12
Yeah, this is Ben Rivers and that's Ben Russell.
AUDIENCE 1:07:18
Okay. Thank you.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:07:20
The one with the beard is Ben Russell.
AUDIENCE 1:07:21
Um, and I guess I...
BEN RUSSELL 1:07:22
Well, I haven't always had a beard. So...
DAVID PENDLETON 1:07:24
But, right now.
AUDIENCE 1:07:25
You’re the taller one.
BEN RUSSELL 1:07:27
Yeah.
AUDIENCE 1:07:30
No offense.
BEN RIVERS 1:07:34
Hey…
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE 1:07:35
I apologize.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:07:36
Ben Russell's the American and Ben Rivers is the Brit.
AUDIENCE 1:07:38
Fair enough. I think this is more of a comment to the earlier question about how all three sections are related. And I think you just did it really well, but to me, they're related because they were [INAUDIBLE] liminal communities which sort of separate themselves from the status quo or the dominant culture in a way, and I think Victor Turner wrote a lot about that in the 1970s in relation [INAUDIBLE] or native tribes, but I think in our contemporary culture, I see it as being applicable to like, really small communal scenes like [INAUDIBLE] cultures. And I think the juxtaposition of black metal [INAUDIBLE] in addition to all of the reasons [INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:08:30
I mean, we were definitely, like, trying to figure out another way that's not living with your partner in a small apartment in a city and owning things. I mean, just like, knowing all of the ways that people have tried to strategize, to live in other ways. I mean, when I say “the ghost of civilization,” it's really like, thinking about the fact that we have to build things on top of other things. Pyramids on top of pyramids, churches on top of pyramids on top of pyramids, you know, talking about the construction of society while looking at the ruins of a society.
AUDIENCE 1:09:09
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:09:23
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I mean the performance thing was another. I mean, so, the concert is like 30 minutes long, and the concert is and the separation that one has experienced is done as soon as one, like, removes their makeup and walks out or leaves.
AUDIENCE 1:09:48
I'm sorry. Like a ritualistic way of wiping yourself clean and then re-identifying with a different space. Transition one identity to another where, like, one is internal in this bar space [INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:10:12
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:10:17
Thank you. There is a question over here. Lydia.
AUDIENCE 1:10:23
I just wanted to ask if you wanted to say any more about your thoughts about Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski and how you interpret Ted Kaczynski in relation to...I don't know how into anti-civilization critique you are, but I also want to mention that James Benning has been really interested in Ted Kaczynski, and Julie Ault wrote a book called Two Cabins about Thoreau, and she did a really great essay on Thoreau in relation to Kaczynski.
BEN RUSSELL 1:10:47
Yeah, I mean, Benning’s film Stemple Pass, I saw after we'd been working on this for a while. So James Benning built a replica of Thoreau’s cabin and a replica of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin. I guess we always knew about that project but weren't...
BEN RIVERS 1:11:07
Yeah. I mean, this project took a while. We were working on it for [INAUDIBLE] so I think maybe simultaneously with James' project. They were names that we talked about, because they kind of epitomize the two very opposing ways of thinking about living in solitude. Well, kind of making the assumption that one is taking things to the extreme in a very negative kind of way.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RIVERS 1:11:53
You know, so the whole film we're not looking at these worlds through kind of rose-tinted glasses. We want to be aware that you can't idealize them. You have to be aware of the dark side to kind of reach the light. So that's why they were both discussed when we think about what it means to separate yourself from society.
BEN RUSSELL 1:12:28
Then there’s positive and negative potential in all things and we talked a lot about the potential for failure, or the clear precedent of failure in these things, in the ambition to remove oneself. You have Thoreau and then you have Kaczynski, who goes mad, or you know, feels like the burden of the social around him and decides to act out against it. And with black metal, I mean, it was also similar. That movement has its origin. I mean, there are people within it, who were part of national socialism. I mean, there are musicians who killed each other. They burned down churches. I mean, there's a lot of real serious darkness in these. And a lot of the people that we know who were involved in communes...I just saw my friend the other night, who said he saw this, the beginning of this film, and the kids reminded him of his experience in the US, except that commune that he was in became a cult, became a pretty dark space. Again, you have the building in the water and you know that it's there, but you know that you also have to build your own shelter. You have to find a way forward somehow. So yeah, so thinking about Kaczynski and Thoreau within this [INAUDIBLE] continuity was really important that it wasn't just a valorization of hanging out in the woods.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:14:08
[INAUDIBLE] got the mic.
AUDIENCE 1:14:10
Okay, so now you're talking about all these kind of “the fly in the ointment” and the commune that became a cult, and so on and so forth. But actually in the film, I don't feel any of these things. And I feel that things are running very smoothly in each section, extremely smoothly. Now that I learned that these were basically constructed scenarios, I'm not really surprised that they're running so smoothly. So I conclude that you've made a fiction film that's masquerading as a documentary, and masquerading as ethnography. And I'm wondering what you think about that, and I'm wondering what is your vision of how that's offering something? I mean, beyond offering a commentary on cinema itself, what are you offering the audience as a vision?
BEN RIVERS 1:15:27
I wouldn't want to say what I'm offering because the offering is the film. I don't want to put into words [INAUDIBLE] I don’t know about you.
BEN RUSSELL 1:15:42
Yeah, I don't know.
BEN RIVERS 1:15:44
I mean, I can talk about some of your points, I think.
[INAUDIBLE]
DAVID PENDLETON 1:15:48
Like fiction versus nonfiction?
BEN RIVERS 1:15:51
Fiction, or like the smoothness...I mean, because there are three parts, maybe individually, like the commune seems to be running smoothly, but the point is there's three of them and kind of at the end of each this person leaves, and it's not explained why he leaves. There's a sense that maybe it's not working for him, that at the end of the solitude section there's a house on fire, which suggests that maybe it's not working out for him. That it is not that smooth.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:16:53
Yeah, I mean I'll just jump back a little bit to earlier because I think I said this before, the film is not prescriptive. It's not a film about an issue. I think both Ben and I are excited about cinema and see, first and foremost, cinema as a vehicle for experience that is not the world but a world unto itself. And pleasure figures really prominently into that, whether that pleasure is pure and unmitigated or like, tedious and, you know, spiked. I mean, that's a question but I think cinema is like this meta structure and within it are all these other ideas around collectivity and phenomenology in solitude and ways forward. And I think the question about the documentary or fiction, I mean, we would call this nonfiction, because I don't believe the documentary exists. So first and foremost, it's like a tough term to take on. The models that we were looking at are models like Jean Rouch or Robert Gardner, I mean, people who have populated this campus at some point are people who are involved in a much more syncretic or dynamic relationship between subject and author and cinema space. And I think there's total construction in the film, but it's also nonfiction. And I feel like this, in terms of the value of a discourse, I feel like that's an echo that you're hearing through a lot of different spaces. Leviathan, for instance. Or the Sensory Ethnography Lab, the folks who are involved here, are also begging the question of what construction is, what the document is, what the representation is, and what the value of the experience or the image set is. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide because as Ben says, we have like created a thing. And I would hope that we haven't talked so much about it that we've produced our intent or our ambition for what it is as something that actually forecloses what it is. Because I think, you know, what we wanted to do, or what we were thinking about is not necessarily what the film is.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:19:35
But it's fiction. I mean, we didn't write a script. Everything is improvised. Everybody who's in the film is performing a version of themselves. All the musicians, they wrote their own music, they played their own show. We booked them in a concert, where the audience was coming to see a concert played with other bands. I mean, yeah, maybe it is a fiction.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:20:05
I think it's nonfiction. I don't think it's a documentary. I don't think that it's...
BEN RIVERS 1:20:09
I mean, I'm not sure about the nonfiction term either. I mean, terminology generally tends to lock things down in a way that I'm not that excited about.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:20:24
Some of these are terms that I used at the beginning, which they didn't necessarily use.
BEN RIVERS 1:20:28
Yeah, I mean, personally I make films. And yeah, they get categorized in different ways sometimes. I mean, I quite like the Godard adage that all documentary’s fiction and fiction’s documentary, you know, it makes complete sense to me that...
DAVID PENDLETON 1:20:52
I guess it's nonfiction in the sense that you brought the commune together, but I'm assuming you didn't assign things...
BEN RIVERS 1:21:00
I mean, we bought them together. I mean, as soon as you point the camera in a certain direction you decide to not film every thing around it. So there’s a certain element of fiction to that. There's decisions. I mean it's about construction or you talk about orchestration, but yeah I mean it's a kind of blurry, blurry line [INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:21:33
[INAUDIBLE] Are you satisfied?
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:22:01
But what if you didn't find out? But if you hadn't found out?
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:22:11
But why were you…
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RIVERS 1:22:48
It's strange, cuz like, yeah, I don't actually really like talking. I would much rather the film just spoke for itself, personally. Because it's really strange for me to think that, you know, because of something that we've said that then changes... Well, I mean, it would change the way we see. So, but it's funny to me to think that knowing that it's more constructed than you thought it was somehow shifts it that radically because what we're making is cinema. I mean, it's something that only exists here. So we're not trying to represent the world, not trying to make, like, an illustration of the world actually trying to make something that is only [INAUDIBLE] So in the end, it doesn't really it shouldn't really matter. Like, what, like, what level of construction it is.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:24:19
Watch it again.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:24:47
Yeah, I mean, if you see it again, then you'll know all that stuff. I said if you see it again, then you'll know that stuff.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:24:55
Yeah, I mean when we first started showing the film, Ben and I were really uncertain how to talk about that aspect of it.
BEN RIVERS 1:25:02
Yeah, for a while we were....
BEN RUSSELL 1:25:03
[INAUDIBLE] You know, it's like fuck it. But we brought in a lot of people who are involved in these ideas. And we brought them in because of that. We didn't get them because they're good looking and because they move a certain way. We brought them in because of what they think and how they feel, and their skill set and what they do and what their relations are between other people. I actually do think that the context and all these things are important, but I also feel it's a process that develops and expands. I mean, The Act of Killing is a film. And I heard that he had, like, upwards of 500 hours of footage, I think, far, far, far upwards of 500, you know, and I mean to talk about fiction and construction when you're, like, producing... I mean, we had like, 14. I mean our shooting ratio is very, very…. I mean, I just, like, construction is important and the terms are important, but I also think the way that you use them and the way you operate within them. For me, it's really exciting to be making films at this moment where these are questions that are being asked regularly. Where a film whose names I can't remember...new directors, new films, the…oh man...the goat, the family in the south, I don't know. Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
BEN RUSSELL 1:26:38
I mean, not sure. But. Yeah, I mean, I don't know actually.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:26:40
Kevin [INAUDIBLE] that's another. It's unclear actually, how much of...
BEN RUSSELL 1:26:46
I think they're good questions. I mean, and I feel like “it's not fiction or a documentary” seems like a pretty split frame, which is why nonfiction has the word “fiction” in it.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID PENDLETON 1:27:06
Are there any other questions? Or maybe that's a note to end on? Do you guys want to say anything quick about tomorrow night’s show?
BEN RUSSELL 1:27:15
Tomorrow night, we’re showing a series of documentaries.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID PENDLETON 1:27:25
Tomorrow night, 7pm, at the Brattle, short works by both of these gentlemen.
BEN RUSSELL 1:27:29
Yeah, which are shot in different places and have different levels of participation and truthfulness.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:27:38
Thanks to all of you for your excellent questions. Thanks to the two of you for coming out.
DAVID PENDLETON 1:27:48
You’re welcome. It's perfect that we're done because we ran out of water.
© Harvard Film Archive
Monday March 24 at 7pm: The Shorts of Ben Russell and Ben Rivers at the Brattle Theatre. Tuesday March 25 at 9pm: sound + 16mm performance by Robert A.A. Lowe (of Lichens) and Ben Russell at Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge.
This screening is presented in conjunction with a series of events presented by the Film Study Center of Harvard, Balagan Films, the DocYard and Non-Event.
