On View: Ben Russell's "Trypps #7 (Badlands)"

by James Hansen

Currently on view at the Wexner Center in The Box (which wonderfully contributes to the work’s critical questions by installing a certain object-to-be-named-later-in-this-”review” along the walls), Ben Russell’s Trypps #7 (Badlands) is all about deception. Drawing on an array of influences and continuing his own engagement with the experiential, trance-like capabilities of moving-image media, Trypps #7 initially appears to be some sort of update on an Andy Warhol Screen Test. A loud bell chimes and a young woman, tripping on LSD, stares out at the camera and the spectator. Shot in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, she stands in front of a barren canyon. She closes her eyes and opens them again. The camera lightly bobs, as if caught in the rustling breeze heard on the soundtrack. The woman’s hair swirls. Another bell chimes, birds chirp, and the wind intensifies. The woman’s eyes seem glossy and her face slides into a smile.

But, suddenly, the film stops and a white light shines out. Another bell. The woman is there again, but the the vivid, blue sky is the only thing behind her. And then, shockingly, the camera swings downward and Trypps #7 spins into the dizzying territory of Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale. (As we will see, this is in no way to suggest Russell’s film is merely a Snow follow up by way of Warhol). When the camera whirls downward and begins to rotate more rapidly, Trypps #7 showcases its initial deception – it is not the camera that is shifting, as in Snow’s film, but rather a double-sided mirror, a reflective apparatus, which, strangely enough, has literally been cracked. We have seen the woman, but only through the representation of a mirror. Between the mirror’s rotations, the actual canyon can almost be seen, but only in the briefest of glimpses. The crack in the mirror indicates our illusion has been broken and the deception uncovered. Yet, Trypps #7 is just getting started.


As the speed of the mirror increases, making perspective and the space nearly indecipherable, the woman leaves the frame, but the mirror continues to spin. Here, Trypps #7 shows our initial “tripping” with the woman has shifted. This is not only a vision of tripping on LSD or merely a film questioning the representative status of the image (not that achieving either of those aims would be any small task). Instead, it becomes a tryppy reflection of the cinematic process actualized. The mirror, ultimately serving as the shutter and douser, rapidly rotates, breaking up our vision, yet a constant stream of different images (enacted by the mirror reflecting in all directions of the somehow unseen camera) flickers before our eyes. Trypps #7 shows us a reflection of a world and a reflection of a reflection of a world. This doubling gives us the opportunity to see an image and understand that the image we see is a deceptive representational reflection of a place we can see, hear, and experience, yet never actually see, hear, or experience in the way that film does. The eye of the camera in Trypps #7 lives inside a projector’s lamphouse, recording and reflecting the process in front of it. Remarkably, Russell puts us in a position to witness the sight of an image passing in front of a stream of light, shattering into small pieces, and uniting as it beams out from a projector.

By embodying multiple positions which are blocked and shifted by the rotating apparatus in front of us (the mirror, the shutter, the douser, etc.), Trypps #7 shows us the full range of what we see when we engage with cinema and highlights the inner workings of the system that we enter into when we experience moving images. Throughout Trypps #7, Russell slowly reveals how he has inverted and coalesced the distinct, divergent processes of Warhol, Snow, and others into a singular, unbounded double or triple-vision which is simultaneously reflective, static, and wildly kinetic. What a trip.

Trypps #7 (Badlands) is on view through January 31. Continue reading...

The Holy Grail- My Second Dirty Dozen

Wow, it has been a busy month! Between attending press screenings for the New York Film Festival, researching/reading/writing for my MA Thesis, working 30 hours a week/weekend, and working for Columbia University Seminars, I have been swamped and am, for the first time ever, finding myself unable to balance all I have going on and what I need to do. Of course, Out 1 is really what I want to spend the most time with, but my longer writing has dwindled. This should end soon with a slew of posts covering the films from NYFF (I plan on seeing all of the new films and will catch up on the repertory titles soon, as they all open in NYC in the next month). Amidst my busy-ness, I totally forgot to thank The Dancing Image for using us as a source of inspiration for his Holy Grail entries, which have spawned quite a following and response around the blogosphere. Despite mentioning me as a source of inspiration, I never actually made my list of films to be added to the ever-growing list of holy grail films. So, at long last, here they are!

For longtime followers of the site, some of these titles will look familiar from our All I want For Christmas series from last Christmas. However, many of the titles are new and even though I have seen one of these films since the initial Christmas list (that being Oliveira's Doomed Love, a film I traveled to the National Gallery of Art in DC just to see), I thought it should be included as it is not on the list from any other blog thus far. Thanks again to The Dancing Image for citing us as a source of inspiration. If you haven't checked out his site yet, it is quickly becoming a must-visit on a daily basis. I hope these titles can get added to the complete Holy Grail list that is being compiled!

One final note...as I haven't seen 11 of these 12 films yet, I don't really have much to say about them other than that I have read about them and would do backflips to see them. Better start training to do that now...

24 Hour Psycho (Douglas Gordon)
L’Amour Fou (Jacques Rivette)
Beauty #2 (Andy Warhol)
*Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow)
Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira)
Dyn Amo (Stephen Dwoskin)
Inquietude (Manoel de Oliveira)
Khrustalyov, My Car! (Alexei Gherman)
NOEMA (Scott Stark)
Shit Film (Martin Creed)
Under Satans Son (Maurice Pialat)
Any/All Dardennes Brothers film pre-1996
Continue reading...