will appear in person with the NYC premiere of the complete "TRYPPS" on October 5, 2009 at 9:15p at Anthology Film Archives: Walking Picture Palace, 32 2nd Avenue, New York City.

Using a fabricated Old English term as its guiding principle, this ongoing series of (mostly) 16mm films is conceptually organized around the possible meanings that its title elicits – physical voyages, psychedelic journeys, and a phenomenological experience of the world. Begun in 2005 in a somewhat vain attempt to hold cinema up as a mirror to the live and fully embodied reception of the crazy noise music scene in Providence, Rhode Island, the TRYPPS films quickly expanded their formal and critical language to include the various poles of action painting, avant-garde cinema, portraiture, stand-up comedy, global capitalism, and trance-dance a la Jean Rouch. While the form of these works varies radically from one to the next, when taken as a whole they can be seen to enunciate what their maker calls ‘psychedelic ethnography’ – a practice whose aim is a knowledge of the Self/self, a movement towards understanding in which the trip is both the means and the end.


On the following evening, October 6, also at Anthology Film Archives, Russell will present the USA premier of "Let Each One Go Where He May".

Beginning in the ghetto squats just outside of Paramaribo, Suriname, and ending in the rapids that lie just past the last occupied Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, this film follows two unnamed brothers as they make the long journey upriver, tracing the footsteps of their ancestors who escaped from slavery 300 years prior. As members of the 20,000-strong Saramaccan Maroon tribe living in the South American jungle interior, the film’s silent protagonists travel through the frontlines in the battle between tradition and global capitalism, one in which any sort of movement forward necessitates a continual re-engagement with the past.

Shot on 16mm and consisting of 13 ten-minute-long tracking shots, [the film] operates in the uncanny space(s) between documentary and fiction, history and mythology, record and re-enactment. From wooden cities to gold mines to death rituals to rainforest clear-cutting, this film is as much a dynamic map of Saramaccan culture in flux as it is a metaphor for our global condition. Throughout it all, the sun flares and the lights glitter as a quiet reminder that the gods are with us, pointing towards that forever journey as the only vehicle by which we’ll ever arrive. (2009, Suriname/USA, 16mm, 135 min.)