The Valley of Fire. Oficina Chacabuco. The Calumet Industrial Corridor. From the outskirts of Vegas to the desert ghost towns of Chile - a pinhole travelogue for the world’s end, for what was left behind.

the quarry is a silent document of five minutes in the presence of the sublime. This small, quiet 16mm film serves as a testament both to cinema’s failure to reproduce the lived moment and to its success in replacing that moment with one that is equally wondrous.

"Against Time" is a visual journey, continuing Ben Russell’s investigations into the perception of time and how we listen to music.

BEAST, described in numerous circles as a “three-piece percussive drone/noise force, complete with two drummers and skull-based strobe-electronics” is comprised of three 6’ 2”+ artist/ musicians Thad Kellstadt, Tim Nickodemus and Ben Russell. Members’ projects have been viewed at La Casa Encendida (Madrid), the Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival (Netherlands), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Epileptic eyes! Heart attack ears! BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

"A night sky fills with light shimmers and flecks, surface markings, heavenly bodies. It’s an ocean, a well, a screen, a mirror, a portal. Blackness/void cluttered by growing ephemera. Dark reaches of outer and inner space gradually sifts through shards of granite and diamonds. The mind races as the material becomes greater and more frenetic, reaching a nearly audibly grinding pitch of excitement, flurry, and instantaneous infinity that ebbs at first and then maintains. Flashes of color emerge or are imagined. Chaotic flickering of dancing peasant girls and violently twisting astronaut helmets. Layers of sea slime over undulating life forms. Bonfires and celebration. Explosions, construction. Holocausts. Primordial ooze, modern civilization. Ages and seconds. Floating heads circle kaleidoscopic bursts of shiny beads. Everything everywhere twists, forces through, transforms into, overlaps everything else." - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition (TIE)

“I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.” -- Ponce de Léon Our PONCE DE LEÓN discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he became old forever – an 80-year old Spaniard who would continue to walk the earth for century after century after century, watching as coral foundations gave way to mangrove swamps, as swamps were drained and buildings were erected, as buildings decayed and swamps returned. Our PONCE DE LEÓN is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma – it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de Léon, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself.

2024 documentary film

This is the work of Ben Russell, the photographer, curator and experimental film director. It is the latest of 16mm films on film and transcendence. A young lady’s LSD hallucinations transcend all rational senses and become the key to change barren land into something extraordinary