River Rites

On the banks of the River Suriname, Ben Russell films people swimming, a fisherman drawing in his net, a young girl washing clothes on a stone. Here, the unity of time seems to be a given: it is the length of a single shot, a super-16 film reel. But by showing and reshowing this segment, which he had made for a previous film and then left aside, the artist-filmmaker quite literally plunges us in. He successfully undoes the chronology of these movements, which already had an air of strangeness about them due to the smoothness of the Steadicam. He deviates the course of the river itself. A fisherman’s net becomes a bride’s veil. A simple process, already used by the Lumière brothers. But in this primitivism, Russell finds what he calls “the minor secrets of a Saramacca animist” – and this riverbank is in fact a sacred place. River Rites thus falls into the continuity of his previous Trypps series: the flashing signs in Dubai, a procession of branches in Black and White Trypp number 2… His twisting of the word “trip” materializes in this film as gestures that transform into ritual. Mindflayer’s noise music heightens the sensation of losing one’s footing. Cinema makes possible the impossible, contradicting Heraclitus: in River Rites, you do swim in the same river twice.