Artist and filmmaker Ben Russell discusses the relationship between his two films Against Time and What Distinguishes the Past, the role of music in his cinema, “blueness” and the influence of Lee Friedlander.
by Stefano Miraglia
Still from What Distinguishes The Past (2020) and Against Time (2022) by Ben Russell. Image courtesy of the artist.
A year after the release of his fourth feature The Invisible Mountain, Ben Russell returns with the short film Against Time, presented in the Flash Competition of the 33rd edition of FID Marseille. Against Time is one of the more freehand and most obliquely personal films Russell has ever made, composed of images shot in Finland, Greece, Belarus, Romania, Lithuania and Marseille. It is divided in two parts: a blue section—with a more documentary flavour, but with highly abstract, disjointed editing—and a red section, the heart of which is a long flickering sequence, the film is a meditation on the relationships between memory, time and displacement. While the title might symbolically suggest a conflicted relationship to the present, Against Time is in fact a film about moving forward despite everything.
On behalf of ALT/KINO, Stefano Miraglia sat down with Russell to discuss the links between Against Time and his 2020 short film What Distinguishes The Past.
ALT/KINO: Against Time is closely related to another film you made two years ago, What Distinguishes The Past. The two films have many images in common; one could see that the opening sequence of Against Time, the blue section, is almost directly lifted from the beginning of What Distinguishes The Past.
Ben Russell: I made What Distinguishes The Past in the summer of 2020, in a moment when cinemas had ceased to function and people weren’t able to see films projected. Initially this film just had a small life on the internet, which isn’t really how I want my films to exist. Part of me was worried that it would disappear and so I wanted to change it a bit, to give it another life. It’s more or less the same film: the sound was remixed and the final shot was extended, but I decided to incorporate it into a longer piece as I began dealing emotionally with the second year of the pandemic - trying to figure out what the feeling of that extended moment was. The new material seemed to have a very different colour register, it both operated as a counterpoint to and a continuation of this first piece. This may be the best explanation that I can give because I don’t really have authority over this film. I just made it, you know? I know what I think it does, or how I think it operates but it’s not my film anymore.
A/K: Music has always played a prominent role in your films, and this is also evident in Against Time. How has your way of using music changed over time?
BR: What do you think?
A/K: I think for a long time the presence of music in your films was like an extra character that served—in a very consistent and sincere way—to emphasise the presence of a community, "a communal emotion" to use the words of Dan Graham. But maybe now you're trying to do something different, the music is no longer a character, you're showing the music, stretching the relationships between the images, to see what else you can do with music.
BR: Unfortunately, I don’t have such a strategic approach to filmmaking where I can conceptualise what the individual aspects of cinema are going to do or how they’re going to operate in advance. I know that I’ve always been really enthusiastic about music as performance, as a thing that happens, which is where a film like Black and White Trypps Number Three, with Lightning Bolt, came from. But then that changes, of course, in a film like River Rites that makes use of a pre-existing recording.
The blue section of Against Time was made from the outtakes of The Invisible Mountain. I made it this way because I didn’t have the opportunity to travel, to be out in the world or around groups of people; I was only able to edit based on the material that I already had in front of me. I would say that those conditions led me to a particular song by Cyndi Lauper – one which I had listened to a lot as I drove around illegally in the south of France during the pandemic. This soundtrack was in my brain and there was a real melancholy to it - or to its possibilities – one that aligned nicely with the feeling of the images that I was piecing together. It just made sense as a sound that started as a song and transformed into a tone and then returned to being a song, all of this within the first ten seconds of the track.
Still from Against Time (Ben Russell, 2022). Image courtesy of the artist.
Maybe there’s a parallel to the way I used sound or music in the red section but I’m not sure; I was gathering images with the intention of putting them into a film without knowing exactly what the film was. It was more a process of accumulation, one in which I was going out to film ruins and flamingos and old villages with my partner, with my daughter, with my friends. This was also one of the first times that I’ve had a studio and without the ability to travel, I made a real effort to spend time there recording improvisations on a modular synthesizer that I’ve been using a bit too casually for the last eight years. I’ve done a few performances with it and used some recordings in The Invisible Mountain but I hadn’t really made any music up until this point. Even now - saying that I’m making music - I feel uncomfortable because I don’t think of myself as a musician.
What I was trying to make into an audio practice felt like it was moving in parallel to a practice of recording images. The resulting sounds seem very clearly to exist as an analogue of the image and vice versa - I found a way of editing images that is also a way of making sounds. The difference is in the medium but not in the content or the subject. As for the sounds themselves, I was really excited about their tonality, their colour, how they operated emotionally and what the possibilities of producing a slow change might be; how a dark and percussive opening could grow brighter, how it could maintain the same rhythm and hard-panned movement from left to right as an acoustic rhyme to the visual intensity of a three-frame image flicker.
Of course, I won’t deny that my interest in music is an interest in collective experience and being with other people. This is also probably why I don’t think about myself as a musician - because I don’t have any interest in recording. I’m interested in performing, I’m interested in liveness. Again, that’s something that was totally lacking over the last two years of the pandemic. That possibility disappeared as well, which is for me what that cloud on the stage represents: an empty stage with a fog of mist, a real absence of bodies, of beings, of actions, of activities, of presence.
A/K: That shot of the blue section is, in my opinion, perhaps the most intense image of the film. At what point in the film’s making did you decide to use that image?
BR: It’s hard to know when things happened sequentially. I know that the film began because I was initially very drawn to the image of the soldiers with balloons in Minsk, with Cyrillic text and fireworks floating overhead. When I filmed in Minsk on independence day in 2019, the fireworks were in celebration of a particular idea of national power. When the protests in Belarus began a year later and people started being arrested and disappeared en masse, the images remained the same but the feeling of them had changed almost entirely. The passage of time had imbued them with pathos, sorrow and a real desire for movement to move back further and further.
The stage-fog shot is a shot that I had really liked for a while but didn’t have a place for. Once the fireworks reappeared, it made a new kind of sense in relation to those other images, one that it was an extension of the feeling, of the way that I was thinking about time, and history and death and disappearance and blueness.
A/K: Blueness?
BR: Yeah, I occasionally have a synaesthetic relationship to sound and image. I sometimes understand it better in terms of colour and in this film, colour provided me with the best emotional frame to approach each of those two sections: a kind of red and a kind of blue, with the possibility of change existing within each. Colour as a feeling.
Still from Against Time (Ben Russell, 2022). Image courtesy of the artist.
A/K: Can we talk about your studio, and about your studio practice? How has it evolved over the years?
BR: Until recently, I’d never needed a studio or imagined that it was useful, in part because my laptop lets me travel and work whenever I want to go. My film practice is still essentially a capture medium - I usually film with projects in mind and work on them when I have new material. There hadn’t been an “everyday practice” for me but I wanted to see if I could change this approach. For a variety of reasons having to do with the pandemic and family and my general approach, it felt important to move around less and to be present in one space more often. The biggest change was that by making music and sound more regularly, I began to understand my relationship to both – this is what they mean by “practice”, I guess.
I initially got a studio with the intention to use it as a space to work out installations. The most difficult part of having a moving image installation practice is that the scale is large and it’s necessary to have space and walls and darkness and to be able to exist in time with an image in order to understand what it feels like, in time and space - but I never did arrive at this point. The material that I was gathering didn’t want to go in this direction and so I ended up with a single channel piece. I’m not sure how Against Time would exist in installation form as it feels quite intense.
A/K: In the screening at FID, Against Time is preceded by another film in competition, Welcome by Jean-Claude Rousseau, where we see a photograph by Lee Friedlander, and during the Q&A you mentioned how important Friedlander's work was to you.
BR: I started making photographs before anything else - this was in high school and college, and Lee Friedlander was one of the first artists that I was really excited about. I always found the casual chaos of his compositions thrilling – and I’ve always wanted to shoot a film that looks like a Friedlander photograph. There are so many kinds of photographies by Lee Friedlander that when I talk about wanting to emulate a certain compositional strategy of his it’s not his approach to workers at computers or in factories but rather his rear-view and side-view mirror images that are bisected by multiple planes, or his shots of shadows behind-and-through bushes where there’s optical interference in the foreground and middleground. Because I’ve been shooting my own films for a very long time, I sometimes get frustrated by my own inability to come up with new compositional strategies. I pick up my camera but can only think of a few ways to frame a thing and / or the same ways that I construct a frame resurface in an unsurprising and frustrating way. Composition is one part of what we understand as style, I guess – in order to make an image that looks like an image that I’ve made, it has to have certain attributes. While I’d always been excited about channeling Friedlander as a possibility I’d never really seriously tried it - but I finally did in the credit sequence of Against Time, where the shot opens somewhat clumsily framed on a mountain and lake bisected by a bunch of vertical lines. This was my attempt at a Friedlander composition, one in which the camera quickly pans over to a boat and settles on a frame that is more confident. Even if you aren’t totally successful, it feels important to have influences that you actively try to emulate or steal from.
A/K: Emulation opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, especially when you try to emulate something but into or towards another medium, or towards another practice, there is a kind of practical impossibility that comes into play...
BR: Both the impossible and the unlikely always feel like important directions to push towards. If you accept that something’s probably not going to work – like translating one of Friedlander’s static compositions into a moving image - but you try it anyway, then you are opening yourself up to arriving at an outcome that is neither better-than nor an-imitation-of but rather a totally different outcome than you could imagine. I’m all for that.
The 2022 edition of the FID Marseille ran from 5-11 July 2022
Stefano Miraglia is an Italian-Spanish artist, curator and writer whose activities focus on artists’ film and video. He has written for Found Footage Magazine and Débordements.