THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN

Interview with Ben Russell

You are inspired by René Daumal’s work, Le Mont Analogue. How did you come across this work? What were the challenges for you in adapting a literary work to film?
I was introduced to René Daumal via my friend and occasional film collaborator, Ben Rivers, some time after we finished A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. We’d both been making works that circled around the im/possibilities of approaching utopia and, as a written text, Mount Analogue proposed yet another way forward. When I read Mont Analogue for the first time, I realized that I had already seen / heard pieces of it via the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Patti Smith, Philippe Pareno, John Zorn, etc – and I realized that placing Daumal’s quest for a floating mountain within a work of non-fiction would result in a really exciting set of complications.
The fact that I was making a “documentary” initially meant that I didn’t need to have anything more than a loose relationship to Daumal’s fiction – but as time passed, his text gradually became a mirror to our quest, to the extent that both Tuomo and I really started to worry that just as Daumal died before he completed Mont Analogue, we might actually die before my film-text was finished. In the end, I guess the challenge wasn’t one of adaptation but rather one of over-identification.

The motif of the invisible seems properly literary. What was the challenge of depicting in film what only literature seems able to make visible through words?

I’ve always approached cinema with an eye towards the unseen and have understood that the re-presentation of the immaterial world is where the real excitement of the moving image is. This is an idea shared by surrealists and sensory anthropologists alike, in which the act of documenting a hallucination / trance state / dreamworld / psychedelic reverie / emotional vibration / utopia is second only to the radical possibility of producing one. To this end, I decided to treat the entire film as an invisible object that the viewer could traverse in a fugue state parallel to Tuomo’s quest.

The Invisible Mountain was the subject of an installation in the frame of an exhibition at Le Plateau, Frac Île de France in 2020. Can you tell us about your approach to the creation of two devices for for the image, the installation and the film?
I’ve been working between film, installation and performance for two decades now and the process of articulating a single idea across multiple mediums is central to my practice. The Invisible Mountain is the umbrella for a new body of work that includes, in addition to the feature-length film and the multi-channel video installation, Conjuring (2018-present), a live video / audio synthesizer performance that I presented in Corsica, Berlin, Paris, Tijuana, Amsterdam, and more; and La Montaña Invisible (2019), a monumental sound installation made in collaboration with Nicolas Becker and exhibited at MUAC in Mexico City. Each of these projects represents a different approach towards climbing the same peak.

Your film accompanies a male figure in connection with musicians on tour. How did you meet your protagonists and define the stages of their journey?
I first met Tuomo Tuovinen in Northern Finland during the filming of A Spell to Ward off the Darkness in 2012. He helped us burn down a house and later joined us in Estonia for a month in a makeshift commune on the island of Vormsi. It was there that he told the “finger-in-the-asshole” story that is one of the funniest moments in that film. Tuomo and I formed a quick friendship and we decided to collaborate on a filmed portrait of him some day. It took almost a decade, but now The Invisible Mountain exists as both an indirect sequel and a conceptual spin-off to A Spell, which I find quite exciting. My former art-school student Taraka Larson (from Prince Rama) and Katri Sipilainen (from Olimpia Splendid) are in The Invisible Mountain and they were also with us on Vormsi. I saw Olimpia Splendid perform a year after A Spell and was totally awestruck – they really are one of the best live bands that I have ever seen. I had a similar feeling the first time I saw Greg Fox drumming in Liturgy (the singer of Liturgy also appears in A Spell). I suppose that I’d been waiting for a reason to work with each of these incredible musicians – and when I decided that this portrait film né spirit-quest should begin as a kind of concert film, I invited Taraka, Greg, Katri, Heta and Jonnna to join me on the road. I organized a five-date mini-tour between Finland-Estonia-Latvia-Lithuania for the three groups, filming a portion of every show. After the last concert, we spent a few days swimming and playing music on a farm in the Lithuanian countryside before the musicians left and my diminished crew headed onwards through Belarus in search of that mythic mountain floating in the sea.

Your film has a circular movement that gives the sensation of a stillness in the displacement, engaging a reflection on the journey. How did you work on the writing and editing of The Invisible Mountain?

It was always clear to me that this film would exist as a kind of hallucination, as a direct portrait of the perceptual experience of its subject. I wanted there to be a seamless confusion between dream world and waking life, between sound and image, between middle and beginning and end. I edit all of my own films and I really love a hard image / sound cut – but the hypnagogic character of this film required me to take a different approach. I spent a lot of time working with my good friend and sound designer Nicolas Becker on the audio transitions between edits, creating a thick sonic landscape in which sounds would constantly transform into one another, in which waveforms would lead and images would follow in a sort of deferred causality.

The Invisible Mountain constructs a hyptnotic perceptual regime induced by music. Can you tell us about your approach to music and its place in the film? Is it for you the evocative power par excellence ?

I think more about live music than recorded music, I guess because I draw a lot of energy from performance. Among other things, live music has its own time signature – one that propels your body through time as it oscillates from stoner drone to percussive strike. Live music is concrete where recorded music is abstract – it is the thing happening now, with and through us. Live music offers a flicker of utopia, an escape to a temporary autonomous zone. Live music is live and therefore always better than a filmed concert – but because live music had given me some of the most transformative experiences I’d ever had, I started trying quite early in my career to find a way to get cinema to do the same thing. The representation of music that I’ve landed on here in The Invisible Mountain is one that merges the kinetic energy of live performance with a kind of cinema performance akin to Jean Rouch’s idea of cine-trance – complete with Steadicam and 5.1 audio recording. The result is specific and unique to the cinema, an event that exists both right now and across all the right-nows simultaneously existing onscreen. For a film like The Invisible Mountain that aspires to exist across multiple times at once, live music offered one of the best ways to achieve this.

You choose to include yourself in your film and to make yourself a protagonist who shares the character’s quest and wandering. Why this choice to bring the invisible, the off-screen of the film making into the film ?

Inasmuch as the narrator of Mont Analogue was a surrogate for René Daumal, it was always clear to me that Tuomo was a surrogate for me. He was ostensibly the subject of the film – but I was the architect, the producer, director, camera operator, booking agent and driver organizing the film around the subject. I was his Pere Sogol – or maybe he was mine? Either way, his quest was wound up in mine from the beginning, so much so that it became difficult to know which was which. We both wanted to find that invisible mountain, we both wanted to transform and transcend, we both were frustrated when the crew didn’t share our vision, we both were afraid we’d die, we both were disappointed that we didn’t (although we both someday will).
From this perspective, I chose to become an onscreen character both because it felt dishonest to remain invisible and because I wanted to directly implicate myself in the film’s construction. William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Take One (1968) was an important reference for me here. In a sly nod to A Spell, the black and white camerawork is courtesy of Ben Rivers, who joined us for a week in Romania. For a film that exists in a slow and steady state of transformation, my appearance at a certain point allows for The Invisible Mountain to suddenly become more like a documentary than it had previously been. But for a film that serves as a record of a hallucination, it’s also totally possible that I never exist at all…

Interview by Claire Lasolle