“Bringing the Unseen out of the Shadows”: in Pursuit of Ciné-Trance and Film-Performance in Ben Russell’s the quarry (2002) and TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) (2010)

Kornelia Boczkowska

doi:10.25038/am.v0i15.235

Authors

Kornelia Boczkowska

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i15.235

Keywords:

American experimental and avant-garde film, ciné-trance, film-performance, Ben Russell, the quarry, Benjamin, TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS)

Abstract

This paper aims to present the ways in which Ben Russell’s films, the quarry and TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS), tend to draw on conventions traditionally associated with ciné-trance (TRYPPS #7), as developed by Jean Rouch, and film-performance (TRYPPS #7 and the quarry). While both pictures invoke the presence of the sublime, the quarry transforms the featured landscape into an image-object and hence fails to represent the lived experience and instead provides the audience with a spectacle or a sensation simultaneously engaging them in the performance on their own terms. Meanwhile, TRYPPS #7’s reliance on ciné-trance becomes more evident in its attempt to expose the hypnotic and deceptive capabilities of moving-image media, which do not only distort the spectator’s rational sense of space and perspective, but also connote the phenomenon of possession itself through featuring the protagonist’s narcotic trance. To achieve the desired effect, Russell creates an atmosphere of sublimity and transcendence by means of structural and avant-garde film’s devices that transcend the realist–narrative paradigm of anthropological filmmaking, including static and kinetic montage, multiple perspectives, hand-held and rotating camera movements, intimate long takes or fixed shots of extended duration.

Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper

How to cite this article: Boczkowska, Kornelia. "'Bringing the Unseen out of the Shadows': in Pursuit of Ciné-Trance and Film-Performance in Ben Russell’s the quarry (2002) and TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) (2010)." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 113–126. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.235

Author Biography

Kornelia Boczkowska

http://wa.amu.edu.pl/wa/boczkowska_kornelia

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Poland

Kornelia Boczkowska (1986) is a Senior Lecturer in Department of Studies in Culture at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. She holds a Ph.D. in English (2015) with a specialization in American culture studies, and an M.A. in Russian (2010) and English (2011). She has published on American and Russian space art and space documentary film as well as landscape and travelogue forms in American experimental and avant-garde cinema. She is the author of The Impact of American and Russian Cosmism on the Representation of Space Exploration in 20th century American and Soviet Space Art (2016) and the co-editor of Framing Fear, Horror and Terror through the Visible and Invisible (2016). Her current research is primarily on city symphony and road movie conventions in the postwar American film.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i15.235 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i15.235