Re-considering Ben Russell

LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY (Ben Russell; USA/ Suriname; 2009)

Oh, how it's easy to get it wrong, sometimes. Often the first judgment of a film is reasonably accurate – you know whether the film is going to float into the upper echelons of your Pantheon Of Cinema Masterpieces, or descend into the flaming bowels of Screen Hell. But then sometimes one's judgment is addled, influenced, or off in a corner talking to itself maniacally.

Sometimes I get food rage. If I haven't eaten in a while, and I'm getting crazy-hungry, I become grumpy, loopy, and uncommunicative, all in one go. Pity the poor film that has encountered me when I'm in food-rage-mode. Other times, I've over-indulged on cinema, and the film suffers because I can no longer watch with happy ready-and-waiting eyes. In those moments, I feel jaded and cynical, contemplating my impending and necessary cold-turkey from cinema (maybe go for a run, or read a book, or have a beer, or tape my eyelids shut). And other times again, I just wasn't ready for what I was watching, and got all cross and annoyed for feeling stupid, and therefore got stroppy at the film, when in fact it probably wasn't all that bad.

I'm not sure which brain-fried example suits my experience of viewing Ben Russell's Let Each One Go Where He May about 4 months ago, but I feel like saying 'sorry' to the film now. I was too hard on it initially – I'm usually quite at home inside a film that let's me drift, but for some reason I felt underwhelmed by this film. But the dear wee thing has clung to my memory, yelling “love me!” Over time I've replayed many sequences again and again in my mind, and have found myself almost missing the film, as if I need to be there again. Tracking the movement from place to place of two Surinamese Maroon brothers, (from their home village, to the busy streets of the capital city Paramaribo, via a cramped bus journey, through to various work sites, and finally paddling on a river), the film is composed of thirteen long takes, and each take it exquisitely shot. In my haze when I first saw it, I took the camera-work for granted, but having watched some segments online recently, the movement of the camera is graceful, dynamic, and purposeful. One segment that haunts the memory starts with the camera tracking a path in a quarry, following no-one and nothing except the texture and undulations of the dirt-path itself. After having spent about an hour following the brothers, it's a strange sensation to be left alone on a path, feeling as if you're traversing it yourself. Russell lets this slow meander across the dirt-path last for what feels like three, maybe more, minutes before a worker finally crosses the path and we have someone to follow. In this section, one experiences a moment of encounter unlike any other in cinema.

If I ever get the chance to see this film again, I'm there, with bells and whistles and other bits'n'pieces on. I must remember to eat and sleep before the film, though.

LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY

(Ben Russell; USA/ Suriname; 2009)

This is film-making forged from the School of Minimalism. Essentially this is a 135-minute film composed of a little more than a dozen long single shots, often tracking through a changing landscape (from jungle to dirt road to bus to city streets, back to jungle, then to quarry, etc) and frequently following two Surinamese men. I find it appealing to have the opportunity to meditate and meander within the images presented, to not have a narrative forced upon me and to drift within the camera's drift. Previews of the film outline a connection between the journey these men take with the journey their ancestral slaves took centuries ago, and I found myself feeling the trace of history on the actual paths these men tread, and noting the other feet that must have wore these paths into furrowed grooves in the landscape.
However, for once my penchant for drifty minimal film has hit a slight wall, as I found my myself drifting towards sleep about halfway through the film. This film's meditative, long-take pace of a journey through a changing landscape reminded me of Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos, but there's a key difference between both films. Alonso's film has a very loose narrative core at its heart, and is satisfied in allowing the drift to occur within 80 minutes. In Los Muertos, we are going from A to B. But in Let Each One..., the protagonists are going from A to A to A, which is perhaps politically significant regards the journeys the Surinamese may have taken in the course of their history, but opens up the possibility for a bit of snooze-time.
Visually, the film is stunning, and the film offers many sublime moments of meditative cinema-drift, but I wonder if the film could have been culled a fraction.

ADDENDUM (written 16/08/2010): This film preyed on me over the past couple of weeks, and I'm beginning to re-assess my original views. I watched a segment of this film again (on YouTube) and I feel I didn't do this film justice. The fact that I said these brothers are merely going from "A to A to A" seems a little silly now - the journey that is charted in this film is an audacious and brave directorial decision from Ben Russell. By focussing purely on the movement of these two people, with slight digressions here and there, an intensely palpable sense of moving away from an original point is evoked. As they keep travelling, it is as if the ghost-trace of where they have travelled from remains within the film. I keep thinking of the starting point, and recalling the movement away from this point. I wrongfully ignored the camerawork in my original review - the constantly roving and moving camera as it follows these men is incredible, even circling around them as they walk - one moment we're in front, the next moment we've gently dropped back and we are behind them. I correct my feeling about it's length - it is not over-long, it does not need to be culled, and I wish I could watch again right now to re-live it. The score goes up to 4, and a re-view of this film some time in the near future is in order.