Sekula beyond Sekula: Films by Lisa Rave and Ben Russel

Lisa Rave
Europium, 2014. 30 min.

Lisa Rave’s Europium (2014) draws connections between Papua New Guinea’s colonial past and fetish cult, the planned, high-tech excavation of raw materials, and everyday consumer goods. The film weaves its individual images and narrative around europium, a rare chemical element. Europium is a ductile metal whose hardness is similar to that of lead, but it’s not found in nature as a free element, it needs to be extracted from many minerals, which contain it, namely bastnäsite, monazite, xenotime or loparite. Named after the European continent, the material is from the Bismarck Sea to ensure brilliant color images on smartphone displays and other flat screens.

Ben Russell
Let Us Persevere in What We Have Resolved Before We Forget, 2014. 20 min.

Let Us Persevere In What We Have Resolved Before We Forget is the first in a trilogy by Ben Russell that also includes the works Atlantis (2014) and Greetings to The Ancestors (2015). The film is set in the Pacific island of Tanna in Vanuatu, know for being the epicenter of the John Frum cargo cult. The first wave of the John Frum movement was a means to escape from what was known as Tanna Law, imposed by the Presbyterians in early decades of the twentieth century until World War II. Many Tanna Islanders had moved from their traditional villages to the coast, where they were victim to repressive religious practices designed to erase their culture. The first John appeared at night as a spirit at a place called Green Point and told the people to return to their traditional life.

Twisting the conventions of ethnographic cinema, Ben Russel’s film combines fragments from Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for the arrival of someone called Godot who never arrives, with the prophecies of John Frum.