BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS NUMBER THREE



Ben Russell, 12:00, 16mm, 2007
The third part in a series of films dealing with naturally derived psychedelia. Shot during a performance by Rhode Island noise band, Lighting Bolt, this film documents the transformation of a rock audience’s collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.

Ben Russell is an itinerant curator and experimental film and video maker whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East India Trading Co. buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and the Sundance Film Festival to the Museum of Modern Art. Circling around such topics as the American outlaw-hero of Billy the Kid, the discovery tales of Easter Island, the visual ethnographies of Surinamese Maroon tribes, and trance rituals in youth culture, Ben's films propose a new kind of hybrid cinema, one that is drawn in equal parts from Early Cinema, Hollywood, and the American Avant-Garde. In 2003 Ben began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, and he is currently employed as a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago.