“Jesus Christ, look at the white people, rushing back. White people don’t care, Jack...” - Richard Pryor Like the previous Trypp, Number Four is a concert film but it is also a return to the “historicized” black and white palate of the first two films. Because the concert footage is from Richard Pryor’s standup act, the Black and White in the title also refers to race. But, almost as a rebuttal to Trypps Number Two, much of the footage here is presented in a Rorschach blot of negative and mirrored imagery so Pryor is portrayed as “white” as often as he is “black.” And through the afterimage resulting from the aggressive flickering, colors emerge leading to, as Russell says, “black and white becoming a fiction – not only in terms of race, but with regard to the material itself.” - Chris Stults, Viennale Catalogue Essay (2009)

biografia

Ben Russell (1976) is an American artist, filmmaker and curator whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia. His films and installations are in direct conversation with the history of the documentary image, providing a time-based inquiry into trance phenomena. Russell was an exhibiting artist at documenta 14 (2017) and his work has been presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art Chicago, the Venice Film Festival and the Berlinale, among others. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize (IFFR 2010, Gijón 2017), premiered his second and third feature films at the Locarno Film Festival (2013, 2017) and won the Encounters Grand Prize at the Berlinale Film Festival (2024). Curatorial projects include Magic Lantern (Providence, USA, 2005-2007), BEN RUSSELL (Chicago, USA, 2009-2011), Hallucinations (Athens, Greece, 2017) and Double Vision (Marseille, France 2024). He is currently based in Marseille, France.

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