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A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS
2013
Director
Ben Russell
Ben Rivers
Starring
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Runtime
98 minutes
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The title of A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS suggests several things at once: the primitive, the transcendental, a metaphor for cinema.
An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, SPELL follows a nameless protagonist—played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A. Lowe—as he explores three markedly different existential options in search of utopia: as a member of a fifteen-person commune on a small Estonian island; living alone in the breathtaking wilds of northern Finland; and as a singer-guitarist for a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway.
Shot on Super 16mm in a collaboration between avant-garde heroes Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, SPELL is awash in atmosphere, bathed successively in natural, incandescent sunshine, the blues of a perpetual magic hour, and the stroboscopic concert lighting of a dingy bar. Liberated from conventional narrative causality, Robert's trajectory charts a continuous drift that signals a radical investigation of the self, an enigmatic effort to "ward off the darkness" that is engulfing our increasingly secularized world. Is this a search for fulfillment, mutual understanding, a gesture to quell boredom and unremitting solitude, an affront to utopianism, or simply a natural progression through life?
Choreographing the movements of their non-actors, Rivers and Russell explore a participatory ethnography with both their real-life characters and us, the viewers, drawing deeply from the elemental in order to shake us from our viewing habits. Bound by the structures that inevitably dictate our lives, it's easy to forget that the world is vast and ripe with possibilities, and that we should probably attempt a few alternate modes of existence before we leave this Earth behind.
An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, SPELL follows a nameless protagonist—played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A. Lowe—as he explores three markedly different existential options in search of utopia: as a member of a fifteen-person commune on a small Estonian island; living alone in the breathtaking wilds of northern Finland; and as a singer-guitarist for a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway.
Shot on Super 16mm in a collaboration between avant-garde heroes Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, SPELL is awash in atmosphere, bathed successively in natural, incandescent sunshine, the blues of a perpetual magic hour, and the stroboscopic concert lighting of a dingy bar. Liberated from conventional narrative causality, Robert's trajectory charts a continuous drift that signals a radical investigation of the self, an enigmatic effort to "ward off the darkness" that is engulfing our increasingly secularized world. Is this a search for fulfillment, mutual understanding, a gesture to quell boredom and unremitting solitude, an affront to utopianism, or simply a natural progression through life?
Choreographing the movements of their non-actors, Rivers and Russell explore a participatory ethnography with both their real-life characters and us, the viewers, drawing deeply from the elemental in order to shake us from our viewing habits. Bound by the structures that inevitably dictate our lives, it's easy to forget that the world is vast and ripe with possibilities, and that we should probably attempt a few alternate modes of existence before we leave this Earth behind.