The Mirror Stage – Four Films
by Ben Russell

A screening of four films by Ben Russell as part of the series Ton–Bild–Zeit: Filmemacher_innen und ihr Werk (Sound–Image–Time: Filmmakers and Their Work)

Ben Russell is an American media artist and curator, whose works combine elements of the psychedelic, performative, and phenomenological. His films, installations, and interventions are time-based explorations of trance-like experiences. They investigate the history and semiotics of the moving image, employing quotations from early cinema as well as ethnographic and surrealist films.

He Who Eats Children (2016, 25 min.) is a speculative portrait of a Dutch man living in the Surinamese jungle, who is suspected of cannibalism. The structuralist intoned mash-up Yolo (2015, 6:30 min.) is a collaboration with the youth collective Eat My Dust from Soweto in South Africa. Loosely based on Plato’s references to the lost continent of Atlantis and its resurrection in the 1970s in the form of a science-fiction novel, Russell’s Atlantis (2014, 23:33 min.) can be read as a documentary portrait of an island utopia that has always/never existed. In Trypps #7 (Badlands) (2011, 10 min.) he continues his exploration of cinema as a place of transcendence, and in an extended sequence he portrays the LSD trip of a young woman in the Badlands National Park.

A discussion with Ben Russell, Volko Kamensky, and Jan Peters follows the screening.

The event is a cooperation between documenta 14, the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Film and Motion Picture Class (Volko Kamensky, Jan Peters), and Filmladen Kassel e.V.

Admission: 6 Euro
Admission free to all students of the Film and Motion Picture Class.
Due to limited seating, we encourage you to arrive early.