The Twilight State, 2014
Super16mm transferred to HD, 28'. Curated by Northern Film & Media and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival
Still of The Twilight State, 2014
Ben Russell (United States, 1976) is a quite nomad media art artist and curator. His films, installations and performances focus on the history and semiotics of the moving image. He has carried out several formal research works on the relationship between the first filmmaking, visual anthropology and the structuralist films, which have resulted into immersive experiences which are halfway between rite and community, or what he calls “psychedelic ethnography”.
His films have been shown in venues like Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Rotterdam Film Festival or Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. He has won a Guggenheim grant in 2008 and a FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique) award in 2010. As one of the “top 50 filmmakers under 50”, according to the magazine Cinemascope, his films, like him, are constantly travelling, calling home any place where they are.
The Twilight State is an installation with two projectors that, while showing us two religious ceremonies in southern Africa, tries to disfigure reality based on a dream experience where cinema and the world of unconscious merge.
