Ben Russell's Suriname-shot Tiger competitor addresses key questions about the nature of cinema. The Chicago-based director talks to Edward Lawrenson
“My film raises questions, not so much about me as a filmmaker as us as an audience,” says Ben Russell of his Tiger competitor Let Each One Go Where He May. The comment points to the enriching and provocative challenges his film makes of the viewer: comprising thirteen artfully composed Steadicam shots, each one around ten minutes long, the movie eschews conventional narrative to follow two young brothers on a journey through city and countryside, on foot and by bus, from the Suriname capital Paramaribo to a rural village. There is little dialogue. And no explicit contextualisation for what we see, aside from an opening quotation referring to the abject conditions suffered by Surinamese slaves – which provides a clue to the nature of the young brothers' journey: following the escape route plotted by their ancestors fleeing from their Dutch captors.
So what kind of questions does watching this film provoke in the audience? “What is our position, what is our relationship to knowledge, what do we know of history, how do we relate to other cultures, other people, other bodies,” elaborates Russell. “These are questions that point to the very nature of cinema. The original sensation and fascination of cinema was looking at people for ten or so minutes,” Russell continues, referring to work by such early pioneers as the Lumières. “I wanted to figure out how much of that is still present.”
Key to this was Russell's decision to film on 16mm rather than video. This lent the sequences – the two brothers sitting on a bus, or walking through the crowded streets of Paramaribo, for instance – a “warmth in an analogue sense,” says Russell. “Film reads light in a different way from how video does.”
There was an economic dimension to this process of formal interrogation. “Each of these shots cost $300, which is what my actors make in a month. So that high tariff meant I had to have a really strong set of beliefs about what I was doing, and why. If I'd shot this on video it would have felt so much more present and immediate: film has a mythic quality to it, something that allows things to be a bit bigger than they are.”
The practicalities of such extended takes were exacting. Russell is keen to credit the “remarkable” Steadicam work of his operator Chris Fawcett, and to happy accidents that add to the enfolding richness of each take, like the artful appearance of sun flare or an unexpected gesture by his actors. “There's a lot of serendipity, but you have to create the conditions in which serendipity occurs. I shot twenty-eight rolls of film, and the film consists of thirteen.”
There is an intellectual rigour to Russell's approach, but the visuals are sensual and richly detailed, aligning Let Each One Go Where He May with a practice of contemplative, experimental filmmaking – what some critics have championed as “slow cinema,” which finds a natural home at IFFR. “I may lose half of the audience, says Russell ahead of his IFFR screening. “I did when it screened at the Toronto Film Festival, which is fine because I don't believe in the populist version that all cinema should be for everyone. I'm happy that the people who stay are the people this film is for.”
More on Let Each One Go Where He May here.