Color-Blind (Ben Russell, 2019)

In its own way Color-Blind is one of Ben Russell's most challenging films. It certainly offers much in the way of pure sensual pleasure. Shot between Brittany and French Polynesia, the film takes in a wide array of cultural and geographical detail, from local dance competitions to seaside vistas and, at the start of the film, a number of close-ups of Gauguin canvases (reproductions, it turns out) that fill the screen with vibrant color and the thick texture of slathered paint. But there is a digressive aspect to Color-Blind that makes it hard to navigate at times, as though we are following Russell through an essay film that isn't organized to produce one particular effect or another. 

This would be reasonable enough -- a sense of floating through a bounded cultural space, meeting people and examining the atmosphere without any specific direction. However, one gets the distinct feeling that Russell has in fact organized Color-Blind according to a complex code. In his frequent use of onscreen text, we are prompted to consider the role of language and both a nominative system and as a colonialist tool. We see words flashing in bold block letters across the screen (in English) as a man speaks the words in Marquesan. 

If you read Russell's press notes, you will learn that during this segment, this man was given a sequence of color-word prompts, and instructed to name the first thing that came into his mind. So there is both a secret wordplay and an implied synesthesia operating between filmmaker and subject. But for the viewer, this doesn't exactly come across.

Color-Blind also takes in other subjects, such as the local techno scene, the history of French nuclear tests in Polynesia, the filming of Survivor season four, and other matters. As I watched, I thought a lot about Deborah Stratman's films, and how she too sometimes takes a particular swatch of geopolitical space and explores its various layers of history. But Stratman tends to segment her films, in order to create circuits of juxtaposition, where the lines between individual components of the assemblage are clean enough to let the viewer know what exactly is being articulated. I hate myself for saying that I wish Color-Blind were more accessible and audience-friendly, but I guess that really is what I'm saying.