A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness…

I attended a film screening tonight of an old friend from Brown, and it was a joy to see him and his work here in Beirut. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, Ben has spent the past several months traveling to film festivals around the world to show his new feature film, A Spell to Ward Off The Darkness. The program this evening, however, consisted of short films and videos by both Ben and Basma Alsharif. The diverse landscapes in their work transported us to places like Suriname, Malta, Greece, Palestine, and the Badlands of South Dakota…

Ben Russell (b.1976, USA) is an artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances result in immersive experiences concerned at once with ritual, communal spectatorship and the pursuit of a “psychedelic ethnography.” A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Viennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. He began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space BEN RUSSELL in Chicago, IL, has toured worldwide with film/ video/ performance programs and was named by Cinemascope in 2012 as one of the “50 Best Filmmakers Under 50.” Ben lives between the USA and Europe and is currently calling every new location home.

Many of the questions after tonight’s screening were related to the short film below. The footage for this “psychedelic ethnography” was filmed in Suriname–a place to which Ben has a long and intense connection…

Ben’s new feature film, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, is a collaboration with the British filmmaker Ben Rivers. The film was born out of genuine concern for our perilous present. It is a post-existentialist attempt to invoke utopia in the present–a meditation on how to move forward at a time when “things are moving to the dystopic.” The trailer for this new film is below…

A SPELL follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black metal band in Norway.  Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort, A SPELL is a radical proposition for the existence of utopia in the present…an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.